fusion-io

Virident, a Milpitas, Calif.-based company creating flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), has raised $20 million in its third round of funding and landed Cisco and Intel as new investors. Virident has raised $50 million to date.

The five-year-old company says today's funding will fuel the creation of a new memory solution called FlashMax that it claims will run databases ten times faster than older drives.

Virident hopes to create partnerships with large data centers, businesses such as systems integrators and consulting firms, and potential investors. Besides Cisco and Intel, the company also has an unnamed investor who is a &… Read more

After nearly 25 years of relative consistency and market dominance by the likes of EMC and NetApp, there's been a recent flurry of activity in the storage industry. In the past few weeks, Fusion-io was valued at nearly $1.95 billion after its first day of public trading and next-generation storage start-ups Pure Storage and Tintri each closed sizable new funding rounds ($28 million for Pure Storage, $18 million for Tintri).

Spurred by the rise of technological innovations like cloud computing and virtualization, storage is undergoing a major transition--the likes of which it hasn't experienced since the rise … Read more

Enterprise storage company Fusion-io--whose largest customer is Facebook--filed today for an initial public offering, but the financials reveal an outfit that's still a work in progress.

For the six months that ended December 31, Fusion-io reported a net loss of $8.24 million on revenue of $58.3 million. For the same period a year earlier, Fusion-io reported a net loss of $13.2 million on revenue of $11.93 million. Those results show a lot of growth, but relative to other tech companies that are planning to go public--Skype and LinkedIn, for example--Fusion-io looks a little green. Still, … Read more

In items like camera memory cards, flash memory is a ho-hum commodity. But when it comes to building flash directly into a computer, the disruption is probably just beginning.

That's why I find Fusion-io an intriguing company.

Fusion-io builds flash memory onto PCI Express cards that plug into server expansion slots, letting customers move beyond hard drives' physical enclosures and SATA interface. That means data can be written and read faster overall, in part because SATA has worse overhead--in other words, bandwidth that must be used to run the communication protocol rather than for the actual data being read or written.

The Salt Lake City start-up isn't the only PCIe storage maker in the market--Texas Memory Solutions' RamSan-10 and the RamSan-20 and OCZ Technology's Z-Drive products are competitors. But Fusion-io has clout: in addition to sales partnerships with IBM, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard, and more than 50 patent applications filed, it's got an investment from flash memory maker Samsung.

Flash crashes the party For all the change in the computer industry, it's actually pretty rare that a hardware difference comes along that actually is more than an evolutionary tweak to the existing setup.

Flash memory, which has displaced the hard drive in corners of the market such as iPods and high-end laptops and has the potential to do so elsewhere, is one of those changes. It combines the world of conventional computer memory--dynamic random access memory, or DRAM--with the world of hard drives.

DRAM needs a constant supply of electrical power to remember its data, but it can read and write data quickly; hard drives store data even when the power is switched off, and can store much larger amounts of data, but they're relatively slow. Intermediate between the two is flash memory, in terms of data transfer speeds and cost per gigabyte, and like a hard drive it can store data when the computer is switched off.

The first large-scale arrival of flash memory in computers took the form of solid-state drives, or SSDs. They packed flash memory into the type of enclosure that in the past housed a hard drive, and they communicated with the rest of the computer system with the standard hard drive interface, called SATA. Advatages of SSDs include faster data transfer, better ruggedness because of the absence of moving parts, and lower power consumption because the physical platters of hard drives don't need to be rotated all the time. … Read more

Warning: This post is larded with acronyms. Sorry, it can't be helped.

Fusion-io recently announced SMLC flash memory. What is SMLC? To understand how Fusion-io coined this acronym (and it is all theirs), you need to first become familiar with two more--SLC for Single Level Cell and MLC for Multi Level Cell. Both refer to types of NAND flash memory, and both are hot items right now, but for different reasons. MLC NAND flash memory is relatively cheap, abundant, and commonly used in PCs, laptops, and mobile messaging devices. SLC is in comparison much more expensive, not as … Read more

Fusion-io, the company that boasts Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, says it has achieved extremely high data transfer speeds on servers from Hewlett-Packard.

Solid-state drives are generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at reading data, and have no moving parts, unlike hard disk drives.

Working together in HP's ProLiant engineering labs in Houston, HP and Fusion-io built a system using five 320GB ioDrive Duos (see photo) and six 160GB ioDrives in a single HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server, running with four Quad-Core Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, Fusion-io said.

This configuration allowed the engineers to … Read more

Fusion-io on Wednesday announced the IoDrive Duo, which the company claims is the fastest to date. Fusion-io also claims Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist.

Targeted primarily at business applications such as database servers, capacities range from 160 gigabytes to 640 gigabytes. And by the second half of this year, this will increase to 1.28 terabytes.

The boards are based on PCI Express data bus and can sustain up to 20 gigabits per second of raw throughput--many times the rate of fast hard-disk drives. Sustained read bandwidth is 1,500 megabytes per second, while sustained write bandwidth … Read more

What does Steve Wozniak know about solid-state drives that we don't? David Flynn, the chief technology officer of SSD start-up Fusion-io, provides some insight into why the Apple co-founder is joining the company as chief scientist.

I talked with Flynn on the phone about what the Salt Lake City start-up, founded in 2006, does and what attracted Wozniak.

Enterprise solid-state drives typically offer much better performance than even the fastest hard-disk drives. Fusion-io claims that its IoDrive improves storage performance by as much as 1,000 times over traditional disk arrays while operating at a fraction of the power … Read more

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has joined Fusion-io, a start-up specializing in high-speed solid-state drives, the company said Thursday.

Wozniak will be Fusion-io's chief scientist and will also advise the company on technical strategy for product development.

"With the revolutionary technological advances being made by Fusion-io, the company is in the right place at the right time with the right technology and ready to direct the history of technology into the 21st century and beyond," Wozniak said in a statement. "The technology marketplace has not seen such capacity for innovation and radical transformation since the mainframe computer … Read more