Fusion-io has announced general availability of the new Octal. This card is the largest single flash based device I’ve ever seen. The SLC version has 2.56 terabytes of raw storage and the MLC has a whopping 5.12 terabytes of raw storage.  This thing is a behemoth. The throughput numbers are also impressive, both read at 6.2 Gigabytes a second using a 64KB block, you know the same size as an extent in SQL Server. They also put up impressive write numbers the SLC version doing 6 Gigabytes a second and the MCL clocks in at 4.4 Gigabytes a second.

There is a market for these drives but you really need to do your homework first. This is basically four ioDrive Duos or eight ioDrive’s using a single PCIe 2.0 16x slot. It requires a lot of power, more than the PCIe slot can provide. It needs an additional three power connectors two 6 pin and one 8 pin. EDIT: According to John C. You only need to use ether the two 6 pin OR the single 8 pin. These are pretty standard on ATX power supplies in your high end desk top machines but very rarely available in your HP, Dell or IBM server so check to see if you have any extra power leads in your box first.

Also, remember you have to have a certain amount of free memory for the ioDrive to work. They have done a lot of work in the latest driver to reduce the memory foot print but it can still be significant. I would highly recommend setting the drive up to use a 4K page instead of a 512 byte page. After that, you will still need a minimum of 284 megabytes of RAM per 80 gigabytes of storage. On the MLC Octal that comes to 18 gigabytes of RAM that you need to have available per card. To be honest with you, if you are slotting one of these bad boys into a server it won’t be a little dual processor pizza box. On the latest HP DL580G7’s you can have as much as 512 gigabytes of RAM so carving off 18 gigabytes of that isn’t such a huge deal.

Lastly, you will actually see several drives on your system each one will be a 640 gigabyte drive. If you want one monster drive you will have to stripe them at the OS level. The down side of that is loosing TRIM support which is a boon to the overall performance of the drive, but not a complete deal breaker. EDIT: John C is correct. You don’t loose TRIM for striping with the default Windows RAID stripe on Windows Server 2008 R2. I’m waiting for confirmation from Symantec if that is the case with Veritas Storage Foundation as well since that is what I am using to get software RAID 10 on my servers.

I don’t have pricing information on these yet, but I’m guessing its like a Ferrari, if you have to ask you probably can’t afford it.