14 DAY TRIAL // Fusion IO, a company that is widely known for its ultra-fast solid state drives (SSDs), is reported to be in talks with Hewlett-Packard for supplying SSDs for the company's server division. It seems that the parts that will go to HP are expected to be about three times faster than previous models when it comes to reading data.
In addition, the new SSD solutions are also stated to be able to provide 100,000 IOPs. Undoubtedly, the price of these parts will be a high one, far beyond the reach of a regular desktop PC user. The PCIe-based SSDs developed by Fusion IO have been around for quite some time now, yet they haven’t been very popular among consumers.
At least not until now, for we learn that the company has become the OEM contracted by HP to provide its technology in a Type 1 Mezzanine card for blade servers. Currently, HP is already known to be shipping an 80 GB version that costs around $4,400, and also announced that it would soon start shipping a 160 GB card and a 320 GB model, which are said to cost $7,700 and $13,200, respectively.
The new models are expected to become available as soon as March 10. Fusion IO stated that the new cards would be able to deliver a data throughput of 800 MB/s while reading, as well as speeds of 600 MB/s when writing. At the same time, the 100,000 IOPs is at the moment the highest performance available in the area. According to the company, the latency would be of around 50 microseconds to access a 4K block of data.
Hewlett-Packard stated that the drives would have a lifespan expectancy of around 15 years with a 5 TB write-and-erase rate per day. At the same time, the company also said that the drives were supported by RHEL 4 and 5 operating systems and were also compatible with Windows Server x86-64 2003 and x86-64 2008, only that for the moment they wouldn't work as boot drives.