Fusion-io touts 'fastest' solid-state drive

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.

Fusion IoDrive Duo solid-state drive capacities range up to 1.2 terabytes

(Credit: Fusion-io)

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 is 1,400MBps--many times the speeds of SSDs found in laptops today. (Additional specifications are posted here.)

Because Fusion-io targets businesses, reliability is important. Its Flashback protection, for example, is a self-healing technology that is capable of instantaneously restoring lost data and uses an extra dedicated chip to repair failed devices.

Currently, the IoDrive sells for "under $30 per usable GB," according to a statement from the company.

[man_w_balls]

sweet!
too bad it's unaffordable... $30 x 160GB for the smallest model listed in the article above = $4800.
but the article said less than $30 per usable GB... so $4799 ??
my computer cost me about $700 to build, so... spinning magnetic platters it is for now.

[martin1212]

Unaffordable? Did it occur to you that perhaps you are not the intended customer for this hardware, and that for some companies where performance really matters, $4800 is not a lot of money to spend?

[alegr]

Won't fly. The trend is to separate storage from the servers, using Fibre Channel or iSCSI or upcoming FCoE. That facilitates virtualization, VM migration, etc. This board is supposed to be installed inside a server. If a server's CPU or fan fails, it will need to be pulled out of service; failover won't be possible.

[MadLyb]

I think you are only looking at one use. Not all people are moving to NAS/SAN solutions, but still have performance requirements.

Also, you make another blatant generalization, that just because the disk in self contained does not mean that you cannot do failover. This is simply not true.

If you are going to speak to datacenter architectures, you understand there are many solutions based upon business need.

[Pishkado]

If you can put it inside a server, you can put it inside a SAN. The drive-level interfaces are the same. I can see it having lots of value there for high-usage data like database indices. If you can double the performance of your index, with a tiny bump to the cost of the overall system (since the great majority of your data will still reside on spinning platters), you really have something.