Need a Lot of IOPS?

I was introduced to an product today that caught my eye.

HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator for BladeSystem c-Class

So what is this IO module. It is a mezzanine card that is currently available in HP Blades (it will be available in the near future also for the Proliant Series as well).

It comes in different capacities: 80GB, 160GB and 320GB

Now what caught my eye, is the Maximum IOPS 100,000 IO/sec

Now of course this not certified for ESX (YET!!)

But I am thinking could this an amazing solution for certain use cases. If you have an intensive I/O VM it could use this device as its storage.

True, the biggest issue here is that the disk here is local and not shared storage. Which of course is a major issue and limits this solution to very specific use cases, but to get 100,000 IOPS would need something like this (100,000 I/O Operations Per Second, One ESX Host)

The next step was to get our hands on enough storage to run the experiments on a large scale. We went to the Midrange Partner Solutions Engineering team at EMC, Santa Clara and they were kind enough to let us use the storage infrastructure in their lab. They loaned us three CLARiiON CX3-80 storage arrays, each with 165 15K RPM disks, for a total of 495 disks and 77TB of storage. Our experiments used the Iometer I/O stress tool running in virtual machines on a server equipped with ESX 3.5 Update 1. The server was a quad-core, quad-socket (16 cores total) system with 32GB of physical memory.

Now all that is needed is to find a way and technology to share this storage device for use in a cluster..

Hrmmmm..