“You have to ask yourself, ‘What would I do if I had a system with terabytes of memory and didn’t have to wait for all the data cached in that memory to get restored after a power outage because the memory held the data all the time?” says David Flynn, CEO of high-growth start-up Fusion-io.
Interviewed on Siliconangle.tv at last week’s VMworld 2010, he told David Vellante, recognized storage and cloud computing expert and co-founder of online consultancy Wikibon.org, that the significant thing about flash today is not that it can become a faster disk drive.
“What’s interesting about flash is that it has 20 times the bit density of RAM and, because it doesn’t require power, 100 times the density in a module, and about 10X the throughput. So it’s not flash as a faster disk drive that has made solid state important, its the fact that flash is a memory device that has made a big change.”
So, for instance, he said, when Answer.com retrofitted its cloud database tier with Fusion-io flash it was able to do a 75% consolidation of its database farm and still get twice the response speed that it had before. And the added bonus is instant recovery from a crash. With conventional memory, of course, all data is lost in a power outage. Once power is restored the database reload has to be staged and the cache “warmed up,” which can take several hours before the system is back online. Because flash holds data when power is off, none of that is necessary — once the power comes back on the system simply “wakes up” and goes back online.
All of this becomes very important for virtualized environments in which large numbers of applications share a physical server and all need their data in memory, and for cloud computing. “What limits the number of virtual servers or desktops you can fit on a single machine is the memory capacity and I/O required,” Flynn said. “Flash …completely removes those constraints.” #memeconnect #fio
