HP’s StorageWorks IO Accelerator for BladeSystem c-Class: High performance, low latency
Company: HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator for BladeSystem c-Class
Product:
The HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator for BladeSystem c-Class is a mezzanine card that can be installed in HP blades in the c3000 and c7000 BladeSystem enclosures. The accelerator is installed on each blade, and is essentially a specialized version of the FusionIO card – it doesn’t accelerate storage performance for other storage in the system like the Adaptec MaxIQ, and one per blade is required, rather than one per enclosure.
The test system we received included the HP c3000 enclosure with two HP ProLiant BL460c G6 server blade, each with a 74GB 10k SAS 2.5-inch boot drive and a 160GB SLC-based accelerator module.
Performance was very high – over 800MBps on reads and over 600MBps on writes, very high IOps and very low latencies, with no drop in performance during extended write tests. The higher performance for the HP version as opposed to the FusionIO version is probably because the 320GB version that FusionIO sent us uses MLC-based flash, while the 160GB versions in the HP blades are SLC-based.
Like the FusionIO card the HP card requires a 64-bit OS, doesn’t operate as a boot device, and isn’t expandable.
