• Resources
  • Data Sheets
  • Case Studies
  • Benchmarks
    • The Schooner + Fusion-io Advantage
    • Best-of-Show Trumps Best-of-Breed
  • White Papers
  • Presentations
  • Product Docs & Licenses
  • Forums
  • Community
  • Blogs

Benchmarking the Schooner Advantage with Fusion-io

How much do you pay for the superior performance of SchoonerSQL™ and Membrain™ (the smart memcached, optimized for flash memory)? A lot less than you pay for other, less capable solutions, including "free" open-source distributions.

You can get free software, but the servers you need to run it are not free. Neither are the power, network connectivity, or people to run the servers. SchoonerSQL and Membrain exploit fully the high IOPS (I/O per second) of modern flash drives. That means far fewer servers, far less networking, and far less power to meet your datacenter's scaling, availability, and quality-of-service requirements.

In other words, Schooner-powered servers handle way bigger loads with way fewer nodes. This translates directly into rapid ROI and lower TCO (total cost of ownership) for Schooner versus the alternatives. Especially the free ones.

Fusion-io is known for its very high-performance PCIe flash drives, which are used to accelerate the performance of many software applications. Replacing HDDs with Fusion-io cards will make a big and positive difference. But if you're using Fusion-io cards for MySQL, memcached, or a NoSQL data store, driving them with SchoonerSQL or Membrain will make an even bigger, more positive difference.

That's because the extreme parallelism that Schooner built into SchoonerSQL and into Membrain can drive Fusion-io cards to give their high IOPS a real workout. Here's one meaningful example. We compared:

• SchoonerSQL version 3.0 — which is based on the MySQL 5.1 release that is still in almost universal use in the MySQL community;
• Percona MySQL 5.1.53; and
• the recent MySQL 5.5.8 release.

Here are the results running the DBT-2 benchmark at 1,000 warehouses against these three MySQL/InnoDB solutions, on the same hardware: a two-socket Westmere-based server with 64 GB of DRAM and two Fusion-io Duo 640 ioDrives:

SchoonerSQL 3.0 + 2x FusionIO

MySQL 5.5.8 + 2x Fusion IO

Percona 5.1.53 + 2x Fusion IO

SchoonerSQL outperforms both MySQL 5.5 and Percona by over 75% with dramatically higher performance stability.

Why? Mainly because you use your hardware a lot more efficiently when its driven by Schooner. So you need less hardware. And of course, flash memory has an inherent power consumption advantage over DRAM and hard drives. Between that benefit and the fewer servers needed with Schooner, you save a lot on opex. The more you spend per kilowatt-hour for electricity to run and cool your servers, the larger the savings you'll enjoy with Schooner.

Our TCO advantage does NOT factor in other savings from SchoonerSQL or Membrain, such as the 90% reduction in downtime they can bring or their reduced administrative costs compared to the alternatives. And it doesn't factor in the gains from reusing your current servers for other purposes, which can replace other planned capex.

Learn why Schooner's mastery of the science of scaling delivers better results than roll-your-own with best-of-breed parts. Scale smart, with Schooner.