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  • kanabalize - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Over 900000???

    Seriously, only for enterprise right?

    or the uber rich...
  • davegraham - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    RAID 0 is a bad idea for this type of card. Even if they developed some sort of parity schema (R5 or so) or, best case, RAID 1/0, it'd be more applicable. For most of these devices, it's not about capacity, it's about performance.

    The other thing I'd mention is that without intelligent software controlling the way in which this device is utilized, it's nothing more than an expensive thrill ride. LSI, for example, developed their CacheCade software to allow for their WarpDrive (a more enterprise version of what you see above) to be used as a caching device or as a pure drive.

    cheers,

    Dave
  • Havor - Sunday, June 12, 2011 - link

    And how is raid 0 more dangerous then a single drive with the same amount of flash chips??

    Saying that means you don't trust SF-2281 chips it self, because failure of the NAND chips raid is gone be the same, not more and not less.

    And what use to be a drag do in SAP now is a lot more "fun" to do.

    Do "I" think the the failure raid of NAND chips will be mouths higher then that of controller and the raid chips.

    Sure the extra SF + raid chips are extra links in the chain to failure.
    But that's why you have raid 10 for critical data, and companies like Shell, GE and so on they need for there SAP database speed so they can afford easily raid 10.

    But I could be wrong ^_^

    But my experience with a large database on SSD is great at least, as I work as a foreman offshore in the oil industry, and use SAP daily the system was so mouths more responsive, I upgraded to SSD at home and it made my system feel a lot quicker, but this was like upgrading from a 386 to a i7 2600 when using SAP.

    And also the general experience was so great that they wrote a article about it in the company newsletter. (and was a nice detailed read)

    After the SAP database was set over to SSD drives, productivity when using SAP went up 9% the first week and levelled out at 6%.
    (they measured the average time a order was open)

    And they calculated that they would save about 10 to 40M Euro a year on man hour's world wide and 1900 Euro's on power with the new servers.
    (think they did it for the power savings, they will brake even in 150y ^_^)

    Not bad for 280.000 Euro upgrade, replacing the 12 servers of the old database server, for 2 new SSD ones working mirrored (holding 4 cards each), 2 identical spare ones and 2 HDD based backup servers.

    There was a usually average backlog of about 2 days for ordering stuff, that went down to now 2 hours in one month.
    (don't think they are hiring in the purchase department :-)

    Ware it use to be a pain using SAP, specialy if you did complex searches, taking up sometimes up to 1min (usually used for a coffee break, costing even more time ;-), you now have the info for the same data back in under 3sec, and all the normal data from average from 3~5 to less then 1sec.
    (it was like upgrading from a old dial-up to cable)

    So yeah enterprise costumers don't really look at the price I think
  • Etsp - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Inquiring minds would like to know. Like you stated in the article that while 8 of these in RAID-0 is a neat trick, it's entirely unpractical. Would they be able to provide any details on other RAID configurations that this device supports? RAID 10 Perhaps? Is additional hardware required to support RAID?
  • pvdw - Saturday, June 4, 2011 - link

    Remember to think ENTERPRISE. I think this would make for a really good web "read" caching server for an ISP or file download service.

    Or how about when you already have 10 load-balanced DB or web servers and need more IOPS?

    Or how about multi-layered decision support for a teradata DB?

    I'm sure others can come up with more scenarios where data loss isn't really that important.
  • dac7nco - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    That has LSI written all over it.

    Daimon
  • neotiger - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    The RevoDrive supports TRIM? Does Z-Drive?

    Also any pricing information?
  • JasonInofuentes - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Pricing probably won't roll out for sometime, and it will be geared at enterprise so this isn't going to come close to affordable for most users.

    TRIM? Not behind a RAID.
  • neotiger - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    >TRIM? Not behind a RAID.

    Not true.

    RevoDrive uses RAID and it has TRIM.
  • Casper42 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    I don't know the internal design, but this has Fusion IO competition written all over it.

    And as far as what customers could afford to use it (afford the data loss I mean), just go look at pretty much any Fusion IO Marketing slick and you have your answer.

    I have seen them personally be installed for Data Mining (Pull a subset of data from a different DB Server that has the redundancy you need) and then run an Analytics package against it to look for trends. And when it comes to Primary DB duties, there are numerous functions that don't require absolute redundancy in place, like Indexes and TempDB.
  • GullLars - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Comparing this to a Fusion-IO ioDrive is like comparing a Vespa to a Hayabusa...
    The ioDrive is designed from a completely different mindset, and the performance is not comparable by max throughput numbers. It acts as a memory array rather than a block storage device.

    You have 2 sides of performance, throughput and latency. The ioDrive has latency roughly 3 times lower than this, making it more similar to SATA/SAS based RAM drives than (any interface) flash drives.

    What this means in practice is that in order to reach the same throughput, Z-drives will need roughly 3 times higher (or more) queue depth, and will deliver a lower QOS (quality of service) because of IO latency at any given throughput or queue depth.
    You COULD think of this as a "poor man's ioDrive". But for those purposes, a LSI or Areca card with a large array of good SATA/SAS SSDs will do the same job with more flexibility.

    I have an array from my southbridge that can push 1200MB/s sequential and 100.000 4KB random IOPS. It cost me under $1000 this fall. Incidentally it also allowed me to get the PCMark Vantage world record for AMD systems, with only air cooling.
  • eirikma - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    if you use it to speed up software build farms and other "churning" tasks that only chew through data / source code that is taken from a safe location and copied onto another safe location when done. Intermediate results are in such cases dispensable, but median time-to-build is critical for overall development speed, costs and time-to-market.

    At over 900000 you should speed up a fairly large team by a considerable amount, though....
  • 63jax - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link

    well not good for me, too cheap, i think i'll buy an ioDrive Octal...:))

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