News

posted on 01 April 2008 04:42

Salt Lake City-based startup Fusion-io has announced $19 million series A funding and its first product, the ioDrive offering up to 320GB capacity directly plugged into a server's PCIe bus.

Fusion-io maketing describes it as the power of a SAN in the palm of your hand which is enjoyable overkill. The performance is very good:-

• 600MB/sec sustained writes
• 700MB/sec sustained reads
• More than 80,000 sustained IOPS with random 8k packets
  

The product is a solid state disk (SSD), although Fusion-io would rather not use that term, which has clever controller technology providing 160 parallel pipelines in an ioMemory architecture, with 'io' standing for Indexed Objects. It apparently uses switching and networking techniques and is inherently scalable - just add more NAND chips.

It's possible to have more than one card in a single server and up to four has been talked about by the company. This would provide 3.2GB/sec of sustained bandwidth. The company describes the ioDrive as being 1,000 times faster than a hard drive.

The ioDrive can function either as a SSD or as a memory cache. The potential applications are the traditional I/O-bound ones SSDs are usually used for - database acceleration, financial trading, etc.

The company has said a 640GB card will become avaiable and suggested a 1.2TB one is possible. Only a Red Hat Linux driver is available but Windows (Server, XP and Vista) drivers will become available.

Naturally the card has the traditional SSD advantages of silent running, low power draw and freedom from the mechanical breakdown risks associated with hard drives. Fusion-io says wear-leveling technology provides the following lifespans:

- 80GB - 4 years
- 160GB - 8 years
- 320GB - 16 years.

It contrasts this with the 5-year mechanical life of a hard drive.

The card is available fom April 7th and the pricing is straightforward:-

- $2,400 for 80GB
- $4,800 for 160GB
- $8,900 for 320GB

The company's CEO is Don Basile and its CTO is co-founder David Flynne.

This SSD format would seem to have legs and could go far. Expect all the server manufacturers to examine the concept and to start seriously thinking about including Fusion-io in their offerings via OEM arrangements.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}