14 DAY TRIAL // The Fusion-io ioScale solid-state drive has arrived and is more than willing to forcefully increase the number of potential customers that Fusion-io has, simply by existing.
Indeed, the ioScale solid-state drive will bring normal businesses into the fold, as they can appeal to users besides those in need of large data centers.
Previously, all ioScale solid-state drives were high-capacity storage devices sold in bulk to companies that used thousands of servers.
The newer ioScale will benefit smaller installations, where the average PCI Express drive requirements doesn't go above 100 or so.
That the price is of around $3.89 USD per gigabyte, with the possibility of better deals when larger quantities are ordered, can only work in Fusion-io's favor.
"We're thrilled to see Fusion-io launching ioScale in conjunction with the Open Compute Summit and making this high-performance, low-power technology more broadly available," said Frank Frankovsky, chairman of the Open Compute Foundation and vice president of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook.
"We've been involved in all stages of the product's research and development, and we're excited by this technology's potential to help the industry meet its rapidly growing storage demands."
The ioScale series has some key assets, not the least of which is the top capacity of 3.2 TB per half-length PCI Express slot.
A single controller runs it all, and the small size makes it fairly simple to install 12.8 TB on a single rack server. Booting is possible and even UEFI BIOS is supported.
Sadly, the company's press release did not go out of its way to mention transfer speeds. It did say the units were self-healing and capable of other feats though (wear management, predictive monitoring).
Finally, Fusion ioScale are, of course, compatible with the Fusion ioMemory software development kit (SDK), allowing application programing interfaces to run applications right on flash memory.