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.
They are nice devices if you can afford them (and tolerate their quirks like needing to be completely formatted during firmware upgrades).