The article is a blatant advertisement. Let me counter-advertise with my experiences here. We did evaluations of a Fusion-io ioDrive card and a Texas Memory S

The article is a blatant advertisement. Let me counter-advertise with my experiences here. We did evaluations of a Fusion-io ioDrive card and a Texas Memory Systems RamSan card [1] recently. The ioDrive had strange performance characteristics (but nicely designed packaging). We ended up going with a few RamSan cards (though, they have much uglier packaging). We have a few high throughput MySQL instances that needed to perform better. The database in question is only a few hundred gigabytes in size, so it's a perfect fit for the current generation of server flash cards. Our path for improving improving performance went: - Started off with 32GB RAM and RAID-10 on SAS disks. - iowait sat between 10% and 15% constantly. - Moved up to 64GB RAM. - iowait cut in half. - Installed RamSan card and moved mysql with all databases to it. - iowait became negligible. Now the server sits there with a few hundred gigabytes of flash, 64GB RAM, and it looks completely idle on usage graphs, but it's serving data faster than ever. They are nice devices if you can afford them (and tolerate their quirks like needing to be completely formatted during firmware upgrades). [1]: http://www.ramsan.com/products/ramsan-20.htm http://www.ramsan.com/products/ramsan-20.htm