Fusion-io Claims Storage Breakthrough

Enterprise Storage Forum content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

SAN DIEGO — Can an upstart technology dramatically outdo the price and performance of today’s storage area networks (SAN)? That’s the claim of Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io, which unveiled its ioDrive here at the Demo conference.

The ioDrive PCI Express card offers the equivalent throughput performance (though not the storage) of a thousand disk drives without the cables, rack storage space and software of a typical SAN, according to Fusion-io CEO Rick White.

Because the ioDrive is silicon-based, it overcomes the inefficiency of mechanical drives. In a demo, White showed the ioDrive moving the equivalent of eight DVDs worth of data in parallel in well under a minute in an HP c-Class blade server. Company officials said they also have a manufacturing agreement with Micron.

Currently in testing with customers, the first ioDrives are slated to be available for purchase later this year. Pricing has not been disclosed.

Fusion-io is promising performance of up to 380 megabytes per second, or 100,000 IOPS, in a single card. “A disk drive can do maybe 100 IOPS, so this is a thousand times faster,” said David Flynn, Fusion-io’s CTO.

Mike Fisch, storage analyst with the Clipper Group, said the ioDrive leverages NAND Flash to close the mile-wide performance gap between CPUs and storage.

“The vastly superior performance and simplicity of high-density, NAND storage architectures will push aside the old guard of disk and tape,” he said in a statement. He also praised the ioDrive for being a cost-effective and green solution.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Cloud Insider for top news, trends, and analysis.

Latest Articles

15 Software Defined Storage Best Practices

Software Defined Storage (SDS) enables the use of commodity storage hardware. Learn 15 best practices for SDS implementation.

What is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)?

Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE) is the encapsulation and transmission of Fibre Channel (FC) frames over enhanced Ethernet networks, combining the advantages of Ethernet...

9 Types of Computer Memory Defined (With Use Cases)

Computer memory is a term for all of the types of data storage technology that a computer may use. Learn more about the X types of computer memory.