What does Woz see in solid-state drives?
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 and at a tenth of the total cost of ownership.
Flynn offered an analogy to describe what his company hopes to achieve. "The 3D accelerator decimated the vertically integrated companies like SGI, Evans, and Sutherland," he said. "They used to be able to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for workstations." But inexpensive, off-the-shelf 3D graphics cards from companies like 3dfx, Nvidia, and ATI Technologies in the late 1990s changed all of this, Flynn said.
"The storage accelerator (that Fusion-io sells) is ultimately going to liberate the proprietary storage market," according to Flynn. And Fusion-io is not just whistling Dixie--it has some big backers. Dell was an early investor, and Hewlett-Packard--though not an investor--plans to deploy Fusion-io's drives across its server line, Flynn said. (An announcement that updates the HP deal is coming later this spring.) IBM has also certified the drives for use in its servers.
"We intend to greatly simplify things that have been a bastion of proprietary, high-margin, vertically integrated (storage) companies," Flynn said.
So how will Fusion-io's solid-state drives change all of this? "We have the ability to put five and soon 10 terabytes within a standard 4U server," he said. ("U" is the term used for rack unit in a server, equivalent to 1.75 inches, or 4.45 centimeters.) "In the near future we will be announcing a card which holds two of our I/O memory modules, therefore doubling the capacity but also the performance per slot," Flynn explained.
Flynn continued: "What we're finding is that putting an entire database on silicon has enough benefit, that you don't have to futz around with putting some of it on mechanical disk, some of it on silicon." The company is telling potential buyers to think in terms of $30 per gigabyte.
"We are not replacing a 15K-rpm disk drive," Flynn said. (Hard-disk drives spinning at 15,000 revolutions per minute are the highest-performance disk drives used in enterprise servers.) "We are miniaturizing an entire (storage area network) of multiple drives by making it out of silicon. While a 15K-rpm drive may cost $2 to $3 per gigabyte, a high-performance SAN costs $50 per gigabyte and up--built from those same HDDs, mind you," he said. "Our ioDrives are made up of chips that cost only $2 to $4 per gigabyte, but when we integrate them into a miniaturized silicon SAN, we charge $30 per gigabyte."
Fusion-io's technology is pegged to IOPS (input/output operations per second). And companies such as Citibank and American Express are increasingly looking at server performance through the IOPS lens, according to Samsung, which makes both hard-disk drives and solid-state drives. Enterprise SSDs process 100 times the number of IOPS per watt as a typical 15K 2.5-inch server hard disk drive, according to Samsung data.
A key role for Steve Wozniak at Fusion-io, says CTO David Flynn, is 'not just the visionary part, but involving him in the public eye.'
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Lower power consumption is also a plus. Enterprises solid-state drives consume less than 25 percent of the power of a 15K hard-disk drive, according to data provided by Samsung in October.
Performance and low power consumption, however, aren't enough, according to Flynn. Because enterprise solid-state drives are a relatively new technology, reliability is crucial. Fusion-io offers a technology called "Flashback" protection--extra chips that can jump in to take over immediately if there is a failure. "This is at the chip level. It's not wear-out that's the problem, it's chips that short out" because of the high voltages, Flynn said.
Here are some more specifics Flynn offered. Currently, Fusion-io can achieve just shy of 1 terabyte of storage by using three 320GB cards. "We're doubling density per module and doubling the number of modules per card so we're going to have 1.3TB on a single PCI Express card," he said.
"We'll be able to address 90 percent of the databases with a single drop-in card. Most databases are less than 1TB in size," he said.
And what will Wozniak do? "Not just the visionary part, but involving him in the public eye," Flynn said. "He is (also) helping us change the architecture and focus of our technology."
In a statement earlier this month, Wozniak invoked the potential for "innovation and radical transformation" and said, more prosaically, "Fusion-io's technology is extremely useful to many different applications and almost all of the world's servers."
"SSDs are only the tip of the iceberg," said Flynn. "How silicon will change storage infrastructure...It's a huge thing around messaging and how a disruptive technology will impact all of this."
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
Woz is known everywhere, believe it or not. He's in almost every college computing textbook I had to read for my degree. Furthermore, Steve Jobs is known because SNL even made fun of him. So your points are moot.
Also, Woz came up with the idea for a computer for the AVERAGE person. The Altair 8800 had no way to interface with, unless you wanted to flip those "damned" switches, as Bob Cringely pointed out. Woz took a keyboard like the mainframes had and used it for input on the Apple I. The US Government awarded him a patent for it, which is still valid today.
And then the super-success that Woz had with Apple II paved the way for the Lisa, which had a GUI, which is what Windows uses. In fact, decompile the Windows Vi$ta code and you'll see the pirated DRI and Apple Lisa codes inside, doing nothing. This was discussed on a 1.5 year old episode of TWiT.
You owe everything to Woz in this modern day an age, or otherwise, computers would still be like the Altair and just be video game systems.
[CNET editors' note: Personal attacks edited out.]
Makes sense in the long run.
Like solar power.
Nice if you can afford the initial outlay.
Fast throughput, low power consumption, high reliability.
Flash prices keep falling . . .
Everyone will be using flash drives at some point.
And they'll get them from the same manufacturers that fusionio buys theirs from . . .
You can buy HDSD IDE or SATA adapters for your computers, plug in like 4 32 GB SDHD cards and have a very nice, fast, low-power, reliable hard "disk".
There is no need to go through all that trouble, on a home PC, you can now just purchse a 120gb, 2.5" SSD, Solid Sttae Drive from newegg for about $270 and that's it, no need to get expensive 32gb flash SDHC chips, which are much slower by the way than an SSD, which even a slow model gets 150 gb read and write and an amazing 0.2miliseconds access time, blowing away even the WD Raptors great 8.9millisecond access time.
"The Woz has been washed up for two decades." ---Okay...what's this have to do with him overseeing a project? He's a very intelligent guy and if you read up on your history..you'd realize that we owe a lot to him.
Let the man invest in what he wants and I'm glad he's doing something again...good for him.
Woz also gives his time to schools and charity, and he never loses money in the traditional sense. Sour games you have. Look, you don't like it, then fine, but you don't have to post things out of your butt.
Also, please don't compare this product to 3DFX, ATI and NVIDIA, as these companies made 3D available to the masses at reasonable costs. These solid state drives this company is making are no where near affordable to the masses. Sure, when 3DFX came out with their 3D add-on cards, they were expensive, but no where near $30 per gig. That's $3000 for a 100G drive. How this can be considered cost effective....I don't know. They must be saving an awful lot of energy for power consumption and cooling to make $3000 for a 100G drive cost effective.
Also, haven't we just been reading about one companies SSD that is slowing down as it gets older? Might want to beta test these drives for a little longer too.
You mind is in the desktop world, where performance is a minor issue(even with gamers) compared to the area this product is aimed at.
And Woz is a scientist, as we went back to college in the 1980s and got his degree.
Idk, keeping in mind, this dude invented the home computer( for real people) we all owe him a certain amount of respect.
Now how did we get to today when windows is 93% or more of the world market is clear, woz left the company.
Only when the ipod came out and apple re-branded them selves as cool( plus running windows helped) did apple come back, and even now apple makes most of its money on ipods/iphones.
A SAN's (Storage Area Network) purpose is to be shared storage for multiple computers simultaneously.
What they have created is DAS (Direct Attached Storage) which commands a far, far, far lower price... nowhere near the 3000 times the average price he quotes - $30/gig versus $.10/gig - 1 terabyte drives can be had for $100 or less, even "enterprise" SAS (Serial Attached Storage) 1 TB drives can be had for $200.
What surprises me is that every RAID card manufacturer hasn't jumped on Fusion's bandwagon. Especially considering their ridiculous profit margins and the observing that their card is nothing more than a RAID card with direct attached flash memoty and no need for slow hard drive interfaces.
- by ethieda February 28, 2009 9:41 AM PST
- I can't wait to see these hit the stores!
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