Fusion IO does it again, another astonishing level of performance in such an efficient design, from the case study:
LLNL used Fusion’s ioMemory technology to create the world’s highest performance storage array. Using Fusion’s ioSANs and ioDrive Duos, the cluster achieves an unprecedented 40,800,000 IOPS and 320GB/s aggregate bandwidth.
Incredibly, Fusion’s ioMemory allowed LLNL to accomplish this feat in just two racks of appliances– something that would take a comparable hard disk-based solution over 43 racks. In fact, it would take over 100 of the SPC-1 benchmark’s leading all-flash vendor systems combined to match the performance, at a cost of over $300 million.
40 Million IOPS @ ~250 IOPS per 15K RPM disk your talking 160,000 disk drives.
Not all flash is created equal of course, many people don’t understand that. They just see ooh this one is cheap, this one is not, not having any clue (shocker).
It’s just flat out irresponsible to ignore such a industry changing technology, especially for workloads that deal with small (sub TB) amounts of data.