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We spent some time with Kingston today at AIS discussing an interesting product demo. The massive memory product purveyor showed what they could do with just a few off-the-rack parts in a demonstration which managed a heady 1.8 million IOPS.
Using three LSI MegaRAID cards, 24 eMLC-based E100 SSDs, and an Intel based server, the test system was shown looping 4K random read and write tests. The result? Over 7,200MB/s of throughput on reads, and well over 4,000MB/s on writes.
That translates to over 1.8 million 4K read IOPS and 1.1 million 4K random write IOPS, respectively.
The three RAID cards are LSI 9265-8i MegaRAID products. Each card, saddled with eight SSDs, was able to push out over 600,000 IOPS each on average. That’s pretty substantial, since each SSD in turn has to average 75,000 IOPS on its own. Those 400GB LSI SandForce-based Kingston E100s can peak at 52,000 read IOPS and 37,000 write IOPS, so some caching effect is probably going on as well (each run only lasts 10 seconds). All in, the 24 drives in RAID 0 result in a splendid 9.6TB of storage.
The Kingston E100 utilitzes an enterprise-grade LSI SandForce 2581 flash storage processor mated with Toshiba’s eMLC toggle. That flash means the Kingston is good for 30,000 PE cycles, and 28% over provisioning helps keep sustained performance high. Additionally, the E100 runs SandForce reference 510 family firmware.
1.8 million IOPS is a lot, no matter how you slice it. It just goes to show that when you need high numbers of transactions per second, there’s always a solution to be had. As luck would have it, we received some of the slightly faster 200GB Kingston E100s a while back, so be on the look out for our enterprise performance evaluation shortly.