I received several questions about the performance of the Oracle/Sun F20 flash card I used in my previous post about block alignment, so I put together a quick overview of the card’s performance capabilities. The following results are from testing the card in a dual socket 2.93Ghz Nehalem (x5570) system running Solaris x64. This is similar to the server platform Oracle uses in the ExaData 2 platform.

The F20 card is a SAS controller with 4 x 24GB flash modules attached to it. You can find more info on the flash modules on Adam Leventhal’s blog and the official Oracle product page has the F20 details.

All of my tests used 100% random 4KB blocks. I focused on random operations, because in most cases it is not cost effective to use SSD for sequential operations. These tests were run with a variety of different thread counts to give an idea of how the card scales with multiple threads. The first test compared the performance of a single 24GB flash module to the performance of all 4 modules. Read more…

In May, we published a blog entry about Sun’s “T” servers (also known as CMT or coolthreads). Those servers are terrific for some applications but are sometimes an ill-fit for others.  That blog posting was expanded into a full column for ;login: Magazine, which is available to USENIX members. Thanks to USENIX, we are allowed to republish the column to make it available to non-members. You can download the full column here:

  August 2009 Usenix ;login: column (150.9 KiB)