The Intel SSD 910 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 9, 2012 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Intel
- Intel SSD 910
Enterprise Storage Bench - Oracle Swingbench
We begin with a popular benchmark from our server reviews: the Oracle Swingbench. This is a pretty typical OLTP workload that focuses on servers with a light to medium workload of 100 - 150 concurrent users. The database size is fairly small at 10GB, however the workload is absolutely brutal.
Swingbench consists of over 1.28 million read IOs and 3.55 million writes. The read/write GB ratio is nearly 1:1 (bigger reads than writes). Parallelism in this workload comes through aggregating IOs as 88% of the operations in this benchmark are 8KB or smaller. This test is actually something we use in our CPU reviews so its queue depth averages only 1.33. We will be following up with a version that features a much higher queue depth in the future.
The 910 absolutely suffers through our Swingbench test, performing worse than a single Intel SSD 710. The explanation is pretty simple, small file, low queue depth IO is very slow on the 910. Running ATTO on a single 910 partition tells us everything we need to know:
Look at the small file write performance here. At 0.5KB a single 910 partition can only write at 413KB/s. Performance doesn't actually scale up until we hit 4KB transfers on the write side. I suspect this has a lot to do with why we're seeing poor performance here.
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web2dot0 - Friday, August 10, 2012 - link
That's why you need a comparison buddy. Otherwise, why don't we just read off the spec sheet and declare a winner? Let's face it z-drive r4 is NO FusionIO ok.FusionIO is a proven entity backed my a number of reputable companies (Dell, HP, etc...). Those companies didn't sign on because the cards are crap. Who's backing Z-Drive?
They are the standards in which enterprise SSDs are measured. At least, that's the general consensus.
happycamperjack - Friday, August 10, 2012 - link
Spec sheet? did you even read the benchmarks in that comparison? FusionIO's ioDrive clearly lost out there except for low queue situation.As for who's backing OCZ's enterprise SSD, let's see, Microsoft, SAP, ebay just to name a few. I don't know where you get the idea that OCZ's enterprise products do not meet the standard, but they are currently the 4th largest enterprise SSD provider. So you are either very misinformed, or just a clueless FusionIO fanboy.
web2dot0 - Sunday, August 12, 2012 - link
Come on dude.You are clearly looking at the specsheets. The feature sets offered by FusionIO cards are light years ahead of OCZ cards.
The toolset is also light years ahead. It's not always just about performance. Otherwise, everyone will be using XEN and nobody will be using VMWARE. Get it?
I would like to see a direct comparison of FusionIO cards (on workloads that enterprises matter), not what you THINK it will perform.
You are either very much misinformed or you are a clueless kid.
happycamperjack - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
what spreadsheet? I'm comparing the benchmark charts at later pages, which you obviously have not clicked through. There's enterprise comparisons too ok kid?what's great about FIO is its software sets for big data and its low latency and high low queue data access performance. but if just comparing single card performance per GB price ratio, FIO is overpriced IMO. And FIO's PCIe cards' lackluster performance in high queue depth is highlighting what could be the doom of FPGA PCIe cards as the cheap ATIC controllers mature and overthrow the FPGA cards with its abundant number on a board.
My guess is that in 2 years, FPGA PCIe SSDs would be used only in some specialized Tier 0 storages for high performance computing that would benefit from FPGA's feature sets. Similar to Rambus's RDRAM's fate.
And if OCZ is good enough for MS's Azure cloud, I don't see why it's not good enough for other enterprise
hmmmmmm - Saturday, August 11, 2012 - link
unfortunately, they are comparing the 910 to a 2009, discontinued card from fusion-io. would like to see a new card in the comparison to be able to compare what's on the market todayhappycamperjack - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I love to see some ioDrive 2 comparisons too. Unfortunately I can't find any.zachj - Thursday, August 9, 2012 - link
Does the 910 have a capacitor to drain contents of DRAM to flash during a power outage?FunBunny2 - Thursday, August 9, 2012 - link
It looked like it, but I didn't read a mention. Could be bad eyesight.erple2 - Thursday, August 9, 2012 - link
For the market that this targets, you should never have a power outage that affects your server. These are too expensive to not have some sort of redundant power source like at least a solid ups, or better yet, a server room backup power generator.That having been said, if you look at the main PCB, you can see 4 capacitors of some sort.
mike_ - Saturday, August 11, 2012 - link
>>For the market that this targets, you should never have a power outage that affects your server.You'd wish it weren't so, but environments can and will fail. If it has capacitors and such that's great, if it doesn't this device is effectively useless. Surprised it didn't get mentioned :)