A really cool new start-up you’ll be hearing about from HP and IBM is Fusion-IO of Salt Lake City.
Fusion-IO introduces its flash Solid State Drive, called the ioDrive in 2007 – the ioDrive is a PCI-Express adapter that is installed in servers and improves IO between servers and storage. It gives performance comparable to DRAM – capable of over 120,000 random read/write IOPs with a less than 50 microsecond access latency. Basically, according to Fusion-IO’s claims, inserting an ioDrive in a server will give it equivalent performance to a fast storage-area network.
The ioDrive costs less than $3,000. And, multiple ioDrives can be RAID-ed together in the same server. The ioDrive is available in 80, 160 and 320GB configurations. It works with 64-bit Windows, SuSE Enterprise Linux Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Another product Fusion-IO is working on is called the ioSAN — it consists of a PCI-Express adapter with two InfiniBand or 10Gbit Ethernet for connection to other servers in the network, where it can share its flash memory with the other servers.
Last June, Fusion-IO signed a pact with HP to adapt Fusion-IO’s ioMemory architecture for use in HP BladeSystem c-Class systems, where it will improve data access performance, physical space usage and energy efficiency. Fusion-IO claims that HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades equipped with its ioMemory architecture can deliver more than 200,000 IOPS.
The ioMemory architecture reduces the server/storage performance gap, enabling read-intensive I/O applications to run much faster while also increasing performance of high-transaction, write-intensive I/O applications.
The company has also partnered with IBM by having its ioDrive receive the IBM ServerProven designation.
Fusion-IO is funded by New Enterprise Associates for $19 million. The company was founded by David Flynn, chief technology officer, formerly of Project Blackdog, and Rick White, chief marketing officer, formerly of Phobos.
