Fusion IO is at SIGGRAPH showing off their 320GB Solid-State IO Card. I talked to them for a few minutes, and got some info on how the card works.
One common problem you hear about alot from other SSD systems is the problem of “silent failures”. As the cells die in the SSD chips, eventually you lose the ability to write data to them. Even with the best parity & error checking systems, it’s possible that groups of cells can fail at a time and result in bad reads. FusionIO has addressed this problem on several fronts:
- They’ve implemented a RAID controller into the chip so that reads & writes are dispersed among several chips, improving bandwidth and reducing the number of writes required to a single chip
- 11-bit Parity for error checking
- “Real Only” checking. In the event that a portion of the memory dies, that section becomes “Read Only”, allowing safe reads of your data back for backup.
It’s an impressive card, but not cheap. Currently selling for approximately $30/Gig , it’s not for the faint of heart. SSD prices are falling fast, and showing up in more and more systems so things like the FusionIO will become more prevalent (and cost-conscious) in the near future.
Fusion I/O has an 80GB SSD PCIe card that they used to boot over Infiniband a 256 diskless system with 16 NVidia graphics cards to drive 1,280 (+/-) DVD streams to several Samsung thin bezel monitors. The video streams were ripped TV shows (Enterprise, Smallville, Battlestar Gallactica, etc.) that were being played using the open source media player, VLC.
(This is from memory, from what a Fusion I/O guy showed me, so someone from Fusion I/O can correct me on this.)