14 DAY TRIAL // The founders of Fusion-io, Rick White and David Flynn (chief executive officer and chief technology officer, respectively) have demonstrated at the DEMOFall '07 the high performance of the ioDrive that has been installed on an HP BladeSystem c-Class system and functioning as a local storage device.
The ioDrive will operate either as a cache storage or as a local storage and will use the ioMemory architecture to be able to create a single PCIe x4 card. The most important fact is that this new type of storage solution will not have as a requirement any management software with a high complexity level or any changes to the existing infrastructure or applications.
As David Flynn declared "For years, the industry has focused on storage capacity utilization or IO bandwidth performance, resulting in unnecessary complexity and cost in existing storage infrastructure. Such solutions as exotic disks, expensive caching appliances or custom crafted software only exacerbate this problem. The ioDrive effectively eliminates multiple layers of complexity and cost within storage infrastructure, to address the entirety of data access requirements that exist in today's datacenters and workstations (e.g. capacity, data availability, access rates, data reliability, performance etc.)."
It is designed to deliver a staggering 600 Mb/s data write rate, 800 Mb/s read rate and 100.000 IOPS for each separate card. The ioDrive will act as an enterprise SAN embedded onto a single PCIe device, therefore the enterprises will not have to buy highly performing and expensive fibber channel switches, fibber channel disks, excessive cabling, RAID controllers, or other exotic equipment or software anymore.
"For years, the industry has focused on storage capacity utilization or IO bandwidth performance, resulting in unnecessary complexity and cost in existing storage infrastructure. Such solutions as exotic disks, expensive caching appliances or custom crafted software only exacerbate this problem. The ioDrive effectively eliminates multiple layers of complexity and cost within storage infrastructure, to address the entirety of data access requirements that exist in today's datacenters and workstations (e.g. capacity, data availability, access rates, data reliability, performance, etc.)", Flynn added.
The ioDrive will be delivered to customers in four different configurations (40, 80, 160 and 320 Gb) in the fourth quarter of 2007 and it is expected to be used on a large scale and adopted very easily, due to its many fields of application and ease of use and installation. It will most probably appear very soon in graphic workstations, web services, engineering and science, data warehousing or financial services.
As Rick White, the CEO of Fusion-io, has stated, "Despite its unassuming size, the ioDrive is a surprisingly simple yet extremely high performance, high density device that embeds enterprise SAN functionality onto a single PCIe card that fits in the palm of your hand. And if that isn't enough, when installed in a system such as the HP BladeSystem c-Class, the end result is a technology combination that will deliver unprecedented gains in performance density, making it unnecessary to integrate hundreds of disks, switches, cables, RAID controllers and host bus adapters to achieve the storage performance that today's enterprises demand."
"Customers are relying on HP BladeSystem c-Class as the blade architecture of choice to run their business while saving cost, mitigating risk and driving business growth. We look forward to the introduction of the ioDrive PCIe card and future products and technologies from Fusion-io so that c-Class customers using this card with our PCI Expansion blade can benefit from a solution with superior performance and increased productivity that is simple and easy-to-use.", said Michael Kendall, the manager of the BladeSystem Division from HP.