Category Archives: FusionIO

FusionIO Testing

I was fortunate to get my hands on a couple of FusionIO cards and put them into my lab.  If you have never heard of FusionIO, they are Flash storage married to a PCIe card.  You can see the size comparison to the EMC NS-120 disk array that is in the lab.

FusionIO-vs-EMC

FusionIO claims that their cards can do 100,000 IOPS.  Of course on their website they say that they achieve 100,000 IOPS using 512b IO segments.  I wasn’t sure how useful this would be in the real world, but I used this as a starting point of comparison to my EMC NS-120.  I decided I would leverage my VMware View 4.5 environment in these tests.

I created a VM that would run IOmeter as a service on boot and connect to a master IOmeter VM.  I then used VMware View to scale to 50 worker VMs.  All of the worker VMs are running on two Cisco UCS B200 M1 blades with 2 Quad Core Xeons and 48GB of RAM.  The FusionIO cards are in a Cisco UCS C-210 rack mount server with 2 Six Core Xeons and 48GB of RAM.

As you can see in the results below, writing directly to the FusionIO card with 512b segments yielded ~90,000 IOPS.

FusionIO Direct 50 Machines

Let’s compare that to a LUN of 5 200GB FC EFDs on the EMC NS-120 connected to UCS blades via Fibre Channel.  Hmm… about ~30,000 IOPS.

EMC-5-200GB-01

Seeing these results made my eyes brighten as I thought about all of the potential they would have if I could use them for storage in a View 4.5 environment.