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
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
