acquacow,
I have been looking into getting one of these to build a homelab SAN with a DellEMC UnityVSA VM. I have read reports where once you access this storage device over a network iSCSI or SMB the performance regardless of network speed 1 or 10gbps it does not perform well at all. Is there any merit to this statement? I understand the value in this devices original use case in enterprise as a local DB acceleration or ESX host cache.
Let me know if my question makes sense I would hate to waste $300+ on something that won't perform.
Thanks!
I haven't experienced any performance degradation over network links, just the expected overhead added by those additional protocols. The whole point behind Fusion-io was to remove any and all layers that slow down the data path. Thats's why the cards don't use traditional disk controllers/etc. As soon as you slap a filesystem and network protocols on top of that, you will lose some performance. We always recommended using infiniband due to the much lower latency added on vs 10gigE, but there are some 10Gig cards out there now with really low latencies.
Performance also depends on the slot the card is installed into, and depends on if that slot is directly wired to the CPU, or behind an IOH or other pci-e switch of sorts. Then you have to make sure your slot can supply the needed power to reach peak write perf also.
One of the products I spent the most time selling and working with is ION, it was a shared storage platform. We'd load up a box with a bunch of ioDrives, then share it out over infiniband or fiber channel. Infiniband only added about 70us of latency, but FC added about 2-3x that on average. It was even worse if you went out over standard ethernet.
Two questions
1) Where do you find the device product number?
2) Which file needs to be edited to include the device product number?
The part number can be found in the output of "fio-status -a"
The firmware has an INFO file inside of it that details all the part numbers and what firmware bin file should be used.
You need to be on a 2.3.1x firmware before upgrading to 3.x, there is an upgrade path in the release notes.
The upgrade from 2.x to 3.x is also destructive as the drive layout changes due to added features like adaptive flashback, so you'll want to backup your data.