Fusion-io brings the full disruptive potential of solid-state memory to enterprise virtualization 

The Problem

I/O is among the biggest barriers to effectively consolidating virtual environments. As the number of VM workloads increase, RAM requirements quickly exceed the amount of RAM that servers can hold. As virtual RAM is increasingly paged out, multiple applications are forced to access storage for application data in highly random patterns – the worst situation possible for achieving good I/O. And to make matters even worse, in-server storage capacity constraints force applications to traverse storage networks for data. This destroys application memory access latency, limiting the efficacy of even high-performance SANs.

These bottlenecks limit virtual environments in the following ways:

1. Typical host servers can run only 8-10 VMs per server, limiting virtualization’s consolidation benefits
2. I/O intensive applications (such as databases) cannot run in virtual environments at all

 

The Fusion-io Solution

Fusion-io makes terabytes of high-performance, non-volatile memory available within each server to eliminate I/O bottlenecks. Using ioDrives as a memory extension or as a high-capacity page/swap space, dramatically improves performance and efficiency of virtual environments to offer the following benefits:

• Host many more virtual machines/host
• Significantly improve performance/virtual machine
• Virtualize even the most data intensive workloads
• Accelerate existing storage infrastructure
• Consolidate and simplify virtual environments
• Eliminate the I/O guesswork and risk in virtual desktop environments (for more information request the virtual desktop solutions overview)

 

Deployment Considerations

Host-based Deployments

Fusion-io offers the maximum performance benefits to host-based virtual environments.  Following are some examples of host-based system deployments.

Figure A: Many more VMs per server

 

FIGURE B: Virtualized Database

Storage Target Deployments

Fusion-io may be deployed in a shared storage target to take advantage of the following features, in addition to the above-mentioned performance benefits:

• vMotion migration (and the full suite of vSphere 4 features)
• DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduling)
• VMware HA
• VMware FT

 

Figure C: Example target deployment.

Summary

Fusion-io is the answer to virtual environments’ I/O constraints.  With Fusion-io, you can now run ANY application, regardless of workload, in your virtual server environment: make more efficient use of your infrastructure by dramatically increasing the number of VMs each server can support; finally virtualize your Oracle or SQL Server database; or free SAN resources for other applications. The choice is yours.

Contact

For more information, please call 801.424.5953 or visit http://www.fusionio.com.