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

You're not going to beat a Hyperdrive since it is RAM based. There may be alternatives with the same technology and lower cost.



Perhaps your process is a bottleneck too?

Flash drives on a SAN are currently the bomb for disk I/O
Cost... well, if you have to ask...





Edit: have you tried 10k SAS drives in a RAID 10? Ultra320 SCSI is getting rather elderly these days.





 

How much space do you need? You need to switch to solid state.

Depends on budget and size requirements.





high cost: raid and SSD, although there are some long term issues with running SSD in raid.


lower cost: 15k 6g SAS array


fun low cost: ZFS array - people have built ZFS arrays with 7200rpm drives that bump 3200MB/s writes





I would think your bottleneck right now would be the 320 SCSI, since all drives share bandwidth per channel. If you are stuck to certain OS, you could build a SAN/iSCSI server and bond some GB links if local storage is too complex to build.