RAMDisk an IO dream

RAMDisk an IO dream

As in many companies things start off as a necessecity and they end up in a corner where they can't scape. What I mean some projects start off with a need.

Recently I have been envolved in a project to give more performance to our developers.
The problem began when we started running and loading applications directly from the NetApp.
This did not seem to be e problem when you have few libraries, few executables, as things develop and scale the netwok become the bottleneck, in my case I believe to be the NetApp in fact I would say both.

So I started to look into ways of improving this situation, and started experimenting with RAMDisks.
For my surprise it is amazingly faster than SSD (Solid State Disks).

In my experiements a 4GB RAMDisk was about 10 x faster than Solid State.

I would seriously recommend running your Application off a RAMDisk.

There are many ways you can do this:

• You could install a RAMDisk drive onto each Server
• Mount the RAMDisk at boot time
• Script the copy of application to the RAM Disk
• You could create an entire Virtual machine in RamDisk
• You could share a RAMDISK drive

I was very impressed and we will be rolling some busniess tests soon, I will keep you posted.
While I was researching and investigating RAMDisks I came across Fusio-IO. Take a look at:
http://www.fusionio.com

Take also a look at this Article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/18/fusion_io_9_million/

My step will be to actually buy one of these cards, install it onto one of our ESX servers and just create a Data Store and share among our virtual servers.

I am going to test how fast we can load our applications directly from these cards mounted as drives.

I love experimenting with things and discovering new and better ways of doing things.

I am just blown with a) the results b) the possibilities.

I will be wrting soon about my tests in production and also about the Fusion-IO.

By Renato de Oliveira