Here's the deal:
I need to build several hundred Cognos 7.x/8.x .mdc cubes overnight several times a month, and getting them done ASAP is a huge priority.
If your not familiar with OLAP cubes, just think lots and lots of read/writes. I mean lots of them. No, not that many, several times more than that.
Currently, a Dell powervault RAID array is the "swap disk" for processing (10 15K RPM disks in RAID 10, Ultra SCSI 320) (Yes, I got a $12,000 swap disk budgeted at the time).
Currently, the whole process is taking 12-14 hours, and disk I/O is the bottleneck. And 12-14 hours is way too fucking long.
What I need is the ultimate in HDD I/O. Lag and latency are my sworn enemy. I seriously don't care about recovery - once the processing is done, the results will be copied elsewhere. If I lose power in the middle of the process, I have bigger concerns - like WTF I just lost power.
OCZ's Z drives were looked at and rejected from several reviews of lackluster smaller size read/write performance.
FusionIO and HyperDrive5's are at the top of my list right now. Are there other options out there that handle random R/W faster, or almost as fast for less $?
TIA