see also: -
Fusion-io
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com
Who's who in SSD?
- by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - December 15, 2011
Fusion-io is 1 of over 40
companies in the
PCIe SSD market, 1
of a handful of companies in the
InfiniBand SSDs list,
has often appeared in the
fastest SSDs list,
and has been at the #1 slot in the
Top SSD Companies List
for more quarters than any other company.
Now this is the point at
which - if Fusion-io were writing this preamble (instead of me) - co-founder
Rick White would
say (as he reminded me last month) that right from the outset when he first
contacted me (while the company was still in stealth mode) he said that his
company was really a software company which does things with flash. So
another directory you'll find them listed in is
SSD software. There
aren't many companies in that page yet - but there soon will be.
I've
written about FIO many times before - so I'm not going to simply rehash all
that stuff about new
dynasty vs legacy storage here - nor will I repeat my analysis of why the
company's ioDrive and
ioMemory really are different to nearly every other type of enterprise SSD
(not just similar
looking PCIe SSDs).
What I'd like you to think about instead
- is that here is a company - which has only been shipping SSDs for just shy
of 5 years - but which has already made 3 profound changes to the course
of the SSD
market's 35 year history.
For those of you with short attention
spans - like those
Google
guys I read about recently - this is the short version (in chronological
order).
- persuaded the enterprise server market - to actively promote
accelerator SSDs
- established wide -scale market acceptance for enterprise SSDs which
didn't have traditional HDD interfaces and form factors
- showed that there's value in SSD companies (thereby being the prime
catalyst for a string of acquisitions and other funding within the SSD
market)
roping in the enterprise server market to actively promote
accelerator SSDs
It's hard to overstate just what a great
achievement it was when Fusion-io started to sign up the big server makers in
2009 in a
series of deals which started with HP and soon after went on to include IBM and
a year later Dell too.
Before then server makers had been unwilling
to educate their customers about the possible advantages of SSD acceleration -
because if they thought about it for more than a nanosecond - they feared that
faster servers might lead to less server sales. As long ago as
2003 I predicted that as
soon as any of the big server oems started to promote SSD accelerated servers
- it was inevitable that the rest would have to follow - to prevent their own
CPUs looking bad in comparative benchmarks. But I didn't think it would take
another 6 years to happen.
Although some server oems had offered SSD
solutions before 2009 - they were never promoted as part of the core server
product line - but buried in technical sales lists - to be called upon in rare
situations. Yet out of all the companies which had struggled with the problem
of enterprise user SSD
education for so many years - it was a relatively new entrant to the market
which changed this paradigm forever. FIO didn't invent the solution - but FIO
made it a market reality. In a few more years all new enterprise servers
will be have SSDs inside.
establishing the acceptance of PCIe
SSDs
Most
analysts (myself
included) were surprised by just how dramatic was the market's acceptance of
PCIe SSDs as directly attached speedup storage compared to the long anticipated
alternatives of traditional hard disk compatible SSDs such as
SAS SSDs.
The
earliest indication that this might become a market defining trend was in
September 2009 - when StorageSearch.com detected that search volume for PCIe
SSDs had overtaken that for 2.5"
SSDs. I said at the time - "This is a tsunami warning event for SSD
vendors addressing the enterprise server acceleration market." At the end
of 2009 - 4 out of the top 10 SSD companies were marketing PCIe SSDs - but the
company which did more than any other to excite users with the benefits of
making this transition was Fusion-io. The logic was compelling. If you're going
to go part of the way to speed up your server with a locally attached SSD - then
you may as well go all the way and ditch the HDD interface latency too - to get
better performance at lower cost.
Every major PCIe SSD competitor I've
spoken to in recent years - has acknowledged the debt they owe to
Fusion-io's marketing for making this part of the SSD market sound so sexy and
helping it grow bigger and faster.
2011 - year of the FIO IPO
Before
2011 - one
of the frustrations I had when writing about the SSD market was how to
communicate to readers the significance of individual SSD companies.
It
was bad enough that they operated in a niche market - the purpose of which was
difficult for newcomers to understand - but as SSD makers were nearly all (with
exception of STEC)
privately owned companies (or small business units of publicly traded
companies) I could say nothing about how big their revenue was - and how fast
they were growing - even when I had been told these details.
Money
is a convenient measure of how much a company or technology is worth - and in
the first half of 2001 - there was a torrent of speculation about the possible
value of SSD companies triggered by Fusion-io's IPO. Even direct SSD competitors
became the beneficiaries of investors who - attracted by the growth rates in
the SSD market - learned that it might be a somewhere to invest sizable chunks
of loot.
looking ahead?
The thing about historic
market shifts is - that you can easily recognize them when they happen - but
they are hard to accurately predict in advance. Having said that - it's easy to
predict that 2012
will be another year of massive growth in the enterprise SSD market.
Has FIO got what it takes to keep up its momentum? The SSD pie is getting
bigger - but with more ways to slice it - it's actually getting harder for any
single SSD company to capture (or retain) the imagination of the market.
Effective marketing
and the ability to leverage SSD software will all make a difference.
Would
you rather buy a fast server SSD from a "software company" (like FIO)
or a company which solves design problems with dedicated chips (like
Texas Memory Systems)?
Or is the winning market approach going to be a blend of something in between
these 2 extremes?
One thing it's easy to be sure about - Fusion-io
will continue to be a hot topic in
SSD news for users and
competitors alike for a long time to come.
For more info about
Fusion-io take a look at the links above and
FIO
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com .
I currently talk to more
than 300 makers of SSDs and another 100 or so companies which are
closely enmeshed around the SSD ecosphere - which are all profiled here on
the mouse site.
I learn about new SSD companies every day, including
many in stealth mode. If you're interested in the growing
big picture of
the SSD market canvass - StorageSearch will help you along the way. Many
SSD company CEOs read our site too - and say they value our thought leading SSD
content - even when we say something that's not always comfortable to hear. I
hope you'll find it it useful too. |
|
editor's comments:- November 2011 - I get more questions about
Fusion-io from
investors and analysts than about any other company.
One reason is
that not many people understand the
future roadmap of the
enterprise SSD market. To help with that problem I'll be publishing a new
edition of my SSD market model which brings together all those scattered
elements soon.
Another reason is that Fusion-io does some things in a
different way to most other SSD companies - although in other ways it is very
similar too. Understanding those nuances of architecture and business model are
important. As a result of clever design and clever marketing strategy
Fusion-io has - I believe - become much more "sticky" in its oem
slots than many other legacy SSD makers. There's already enough material to
write a business book about the company's various successes - but in the
context of this page I'll keep my notes brief.
Fusion-io has occupied
the #1 slot in StorageSearch.com's
Top 10 SSD Companies
list for 10 straight quarters - reflecting huge interest in what this
company is doing and saying in the
SSD market.
The
prophetic vision Fusion-io proposes for the future of SSDs is a break away from
the ties of legacy HDD form factors and interfaces as a prerequisite to get
the full benefits of the transition to the SSD accelerated economy.
In
my SSD business model and architecture classifications - Fusion-io is
New Dynasty and
Big Architecture.
If you click those preceding links you'll see some interesting competitor
groupings.
Regardless of whether they believe in Fusion-io's version
of the
SSD Heresies lots of
other SSD companies are seeing an alluring business opportunity to be had by
following what they do - and the
PCIe SSD market is
starting to resemble the 2.5"
SSD market in the number of companies participating.
The PCIe SSD
market is attractive to vendors because
technical barriers
to entry are low - and the
average selling prices
are multiples of what vendors can get for small form factor SSDs. But with more
than a 3 year market lead, a clutch of important customer qualifications, an
energetic management team and strong funding - this is the company which new
entrants to the market will have to beat.
Competitors will probably
have to wait for Fusion-io to make mistakes and stumble - to have realistic
hopes of achieving the same mind share - or else market in the gaps which
Fusion-io has left behind. These gaps include different channels to market and
selling products to the competitors of Fusion-io's own oem customers. |
| . |
| Fusion-io
milestones extracted from recent
SSD Market
History |
In
September 2007
- Fusion-io launched the
ioDrive - a
PCIe form factor
flash SSD with
upto 640GB capacity and 100K IOPS performance.
In August
2008 -
Fusion-io added RAID
protection to the flash memory array in its Fusion-io PCIe SSD and improved R/W
performance.
In September 2008 -
Fusion-io unveiled
the ioSAN - a 10GbE or Infiniband
attached flash SSD on PCIe form factor which will ship in 2009.
In February
2009 -
Steve Wozniak
became Chief Scientist at
Fusion-io. Wozniak
will act as a key technical advisor to the Fusion-io research and development
group and will also work closely with the executive team of Fusion-io in
formulating a strategy that will accelerate the expansion of major global
accounts.
In March 2009 -
Fusion-io announced
an oem deal with HP whose
new PCIe based
StorageWorks
IO Accelerator for HP BladeSystem c-Class servers is based on Fusion's
ioMemory SSD technology. A low level formatting tool for the HP SSD enables
users to choose what level of
over-provisioning is
used - as a performance
tweaking option.
Also in March 2009 -
Fusion-io announced
an enhanced version of its ioDrive - called the
ioDrive Duo
which will ship next month. Capacity has doubled to 640GB with 1.2TB planned
for the 2nd half of 2009. Performance has been enhanced too. The ioDrive Duo
can easily sustain 1.5 Gbytes/sec of read bandwidth. Read IOPS performance is
186,000 (4k packet size). Write IOPS reaches 167,000 (4k packet size).
In
April 2009 - Fusion-io
was named the #1 company in StorageSearch.com's
list of the the Top 10
SSD OEMs based on search volume in Q1 2009.
Also in April
2009 - Fusion-io
announced that its SSD technology has enabled HP to achieve 1 million
IOPS (using 2KB random 70/30 read/write mix) and 8GB/s sustained throughput
from a single ProLiant server. Working together in HP's ProLiant engineering
labs in Houston, technologists from HP and Fusion-io built a system using 5x
320MB ioDrive Duos and 6x 160MB ioDrives in a single HP ProLiant DL785 G5
server, running with 4 Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. Fusion-io's SSDs had
earlier been the secret ingredient in an
IBM "million
IOPS" story in August 2008.
Also in April 2009 -
Fusion-io announced it has closed $47.5 million in Series B funding
and named a new CEO,
David Bradford.
In June 2009 -
Fusion-io announced
it will ship a consumer
optimized version of of its enterprise PCIe SSD family in July. Priced at
$895, the ioXtreme has 80GB MLC
flash capacity and average throughput of 520MB/s. Supported OS's include:-
Windows XP, Vista and Linux.
In
July 2009 - Fusion-io
was once again named the #1 company in
StorageSearch.com's list of the
the Top 10 SSD OEMs
based on search volume in Q 2009. Fusion-io's search volume was more than 2x
as high as the #3 ranked company in this list indicating overwhelmingly high
reader affinity for learning more about this company.
Also in
July 2009 - Fusion-io
announced the results of TPC-H benchmark tests sponsored by, and running
on, Dell servers, and audited by
Performance Metrics, Inc. The tested
system
achieved
28,772 QphH on a 100GB database, at a cost of $1.47 per database
transaction. (The typical 3 year cost of ownership for the whole system
including software is quoted as $41,998.)
In October 2009 -
Fusion-io published a
case
study showing how their ioDrive
SSDs helped MySpace reduce server
count, claim back 50% rack space while increasing application performance
(compared to its legacy SAS RAID system) and massively decreasing electrical
power. As a result of this initial project - MySpace plans to replace all
remaining 1,770 2U servers with Fusion-io enabled servers as they reach their
end-of-life.
Also in
October 2009 - Samsung
announced
it
has invested in Fusion-io.
In November 2009 -
Fusion-io
unveiled
details of a very fast PCIe form factor,
InfiniBand
compatible, flash SSD designed for 2 undisclosed government customers. Each
ioDrive Octal card, occupies 2 slots and delivers 800,000 IOPS (4k packet
size), 6GB/s bandwidth and has upto 5TB maximum capacity (implemented by 8x
ioMemory modules.
In December 2009 - Fusion-io
announced
that its ioMemory PCIe
SSD technology has been adapted by IBM who will remarket these
solutions (initially with upto 320GB capacity) as its
High
IOPS SSD PCIe Adapters for use in System x servers.
In March
2010 - a video from Fusion-io
was featured in a new directory of
SSD videos - here on
StorageSearch.com
Also in March 2010 - the company was
featured in a cameo role in a
futurological article
- SSDs - reaching for
the Petabyte.
In April 2010 -
NextIO announced
availability of its
vSTOR S100
- a 3U
PCIe connected SSD
with upto 7TB modular capacity and 1.7 million IOPS (4TB model). The best way
to think about it is "Fusion-io
in a box".
In August 2010 -
Fusion-io
announced
the availability of a new high density
PCIe SSD - which
supplies 1.28TB of MLC capacity on a single card. When used in concert with
Fusion's recently released ioMemory
Virtual
Storage Layer the ioMemory technology delivers significant performance
enhancements to achieve nearly 300,000 sustained IOPS.
In October 2010 -
Fusion-io announced
the opening of
a
new sales office in the UK.. The phone number is +44 (0)1295 264 33. The
UK Sales Manager Trevor
Cooper was previously at
Data Domain.
Fusion-io also
launched a new iniative - the
Fusion-io
Technology Alliance Program which help to accelerate the development and
market dissemination of products which leverage the company's ioMemory
technology.
In November 2010 -
Fusion-io said it
will
ship a web based control panel - called ioSphere - for monitoring,
analyzing real-time
performance and controlling its SSDs sometime in Q1, 2011.
Fusion-io this month
set new speed records
with its double-wide slot
ioDrive
Octal SSD - achieving 1 million
IOPS 6.2
GB/s of bandwidth while offering capacity up to 5.7TB.
In December
2010 -
Fusion-io
announced that it has been
working closely with Credit
Suisse to integrate ioMemory SSDs with its
Advanced
Execution Services trading platform to improve its data access performance,
maximizing the effectiveness of its low latency trading platform architectures.
In January 2011 -
Fusion-io
announced
a new distributor in Japan - Tokyo
Electron Device - and reported that in the past 12 months it had shipped
more than 15 petabytes of its enterprise flash SSD accelerators.
In
March 2011
- Fusion-io
announced
it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the
SEC for a proposed IPO of shares of its
common stock.
StoneFly
announced
that it will integrate Fusion-io's
ioMemory accelerators into its
iSCSI storage systems.
In May 2011 -
Fusion-io
announced
that more of its PCIe SSDs
(including 640GB ioDrives and the 1.28TB Duo) are
now available
from Dell - which is also extending the number of server platforms
supporting these accelerator options.
In August 2011 -
Fusion-io announced
that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire
IO Turbine for
approximately $95 million.
In September 2011 -
Kaminario
announced
it has integrated Fusion-io's
PCIe SSDs as a new
option in its
K2
FC SAN compatible SSD
product line (which was hitherto
RAM SSD only) to
provide flash and
hybrid storage
options. Using the new options the K2 can provide from 3 to 30TB of non-stop,
protected and self healing, blade server based flash storage in 4U to 12U of
rack space with R/W latency of 260 / 150 microseconds at a list price of $30K /
TB.
In October 2011 -
Fusion-io
announced
that it will sample new faster models in its range of PCIe SSDs in November. The
ioDrive2
family (pdf) will offer R/W latency of 68 / 15 microseconds for the MLC
models and R/W IOPS of 350k / 510K IOPS (512B) for the SLC models.
In November 2011 -
Fusion-io
said
it's looking for more funding - another $300 million (approx). FIO says 3
customers accounted for 77% of their revenue in the most recent quarter
in which the company reported
revenue
of $74 million - nearly 3x higher than a year ago. But the company
anticipates its revenue growth rate for the whole of FY2012 to dampen down to
about 55%.
Fusion-io
announced
that it will ship 10TB versions of its
ioDrive Octal
(so-called because it includes 8 memory modules on double-wide
PCIe cards) in the
next quarter - which deliver 1.3 million IOPS with 6.7 GB/s bandwidth.
In January 2012 - In a historic
demo
this month showing the capabilities of its latency reducing Auto Commit
Memory (ACM) extension Fusion-io announced it
had exceeded 1 billion IOPS (64 byte data packets) in a configuration
which used 8 HP servers each configured with 8x
ioDrive2 Duo PCIe
SSDs.
|
| Fusion-io's
revenue nearly trebles, but... |
Editor:- January 24, 2012 - Fusion-io today
announced
that revenue for its 2nd quarter ended December 31, 2011 was $84
million - which is 2.7x its revenue in the year ago period.
Editor's
comments:- like many other SSD companies nowadays FIO lost money in the
quarter and you can see the gory details by clicking on the links above and
going to their web site.
I'm not a financial guy - but I have
written
an article in which I share
my thoughts about why loss making SSD companies like Fusion-io are still
warming (rather than cooling) SSD interest in the VC investor climate. ...read the article | | |
| . |
|
|
| . |
| Need
Billions of IOPS? - FIO's APIs bring cost in reach |
Editor:- January 6, 2012 - in a historic
demo
yesterday showing the capabilities of its latency reducing Auto Commit
Memory (ACM) extension Fusion-io
announced it had exceeded 1 billion IOPS (64 byte data packets) in a
configuration which used 8 HP servers each configured with 8x
ioDrive2 Duo PCIe
SSDs.
Steve Wozniak,
Fusion-io's Chief Scientist said - "...As an engineer, what really excites
me about extensions to our core technology such as ACM are the possibilities
introduced when flash is utilized as a new memory tier. Instead of treating
flash like storage, where data passes through all of the OS kernel subsystems
that were built and optimized for traditional storage, our core ioMemory
technology offers a platform with new programming primitives that can
provide system and application developers direct access to non-volatile memory."
David Flynn, Fusion-io
Chairman and CEO said. "This breakthrough is not something that could
be achieved with hardware alone. Intelligent software that optimizes NAND
flash as a low latency, high-capacity, non-volatile memory solution for
enterprise servers can transform the way organizations process the immense
amounts of data that powers our lives today."
Editor's
comments:- although we're used to thinking about SSD IOPS in terms of bigger
packets - such as 4kB - instead of the very small packet size in this demo -
IOPS is simply
a convenient and not always reliable way of comparing the relative
performance of storage products.
In real life - users don't have a
choice of what size the R/W operations are which take place in their apps. They
occur at all sizes (mostly smaller than 4kB) and when these R/W operations take
place in traditional storage architecture systems - which internally impose
their own restrictions on the minimum size of atomic data packets - that's where
latencies and performance become discontinuous compared to the value of the data
update due to amplification
and packetization effects.
In my view - the important thing about this
demo - is that the same PCIe SSD product which can perform useful work as a
storage device - can also be deployed as a super scaler memory device - when it
is running the appropriate software.
The difference is that with
traditional storage software - you might expect that a 64x PCIe SSD system might
hit 64M IOPS or some similar figure (regardless of the small size of the data
packet). Instead the demo shows that apps developers can get 16x more
performance in small R/W transactions if they are willing to invest the
effort to make their apps work with FIO's new APIs.
It's that order of
magnitude difference which is the attraction for some markets - because it
closes the gap in performance between
RAM SSDs and flash
SSDs. |
 |
And when you can run apps 10x faster than
other flash competitors at the same price - or support 10x bigger data sets
than competitors using RAM SSDs - that create new markets. See also:-
Record Breaking
Storage | | | |
| . |
|
|
| . |
|
|
| . |
| new "sticky"
SSD cards can chew rack-size data |
Editor:- November 15, 2011 - Fusion-io
announced
that it will ship 10TB versions of its
ioDrive Octal
(so-called because it includes 8 memory modules on double-wide
PCIe cards) in the
next quarter - which deliver 1.3 million IOPS with 6.7 GB/s bandwidth.
This
means up to 20TB of bus accessible flash-based acceleration in a 1U server and
40TB (using 4 Octal drives) in a 4U server, such as the HP ProLiant DL585 G7.
The company says this will enable its technology partners to scale-up Fusion-io
accelerated appliances for big data apps such as data warehousing, research
and supercomputing while significantly decreasing the physical space, power
footprint and cost compared to competing solutions. |
 |
Editor's comments:- While keeping in
mind that recently unveiled "future" products always look glossy
compared to what's already been shipping - how does the new Octal capacity
compare to current products from other SSD makers?
Compared to other
fast
PCIe SSDs - it's
nearly double the density of the
Z-Drive
R4 R from OCZ.
Compared
to fast FC SAN
compatible rackmount
SSDs - the capacity density leaders are the
RamSan-810
(10TB in 1U) - from Texas
Memory Systems and the
6232
(22TB in 3U) - from Violin
Memory. However, in the case of these rackmounts the capacities quoted are
"usable"
rather than "raw" (about 30% more flash inside is below the level
you see).
So Fusion-io's new Octal will enable systems integrators to
meet or exceed the storage density of leading rackmount SSDs while still having
the application flexibility offered by being resident in industry standard
servers.
Fusion-io's CMO, Rick White spoke to me
about the new market opportunities it will open up for FIO's partners -
particularly when they
leverage FIO's
APIs (aka "Virtual Storage Layer"). He said that having 20TB to
40TB of low latency SSD in a single server fitted well with many data
warehouse applications for example.
In a recent article I discussed
the market interplay
of PCIe SSDs and rackmount SAN SSDs and picked up on the theme of "data
decentralization" which Fusion-io had started to talk about recently. When
I asked Rick about decentralization he said it was more accurate to think about
it as "shared decentralization" because whereas the data wasn't
sitting on a SAN - being
inside a server meant it was also accessible to any other servers that could
talk to this one.
I asked about
price - and while
(understandably) not wanting to be too definitive (because the price depends on
who you are, when you buy, and where you are in the channel, etc) - Rick said
in effect that the PCIe SSD market is very competitive - and that all new
products have to look attractive compared to what they are supposed to replace
and he referred me to price guidance the company had given in a recent
investors conference call.
"Stickiness" is another thing we
talked about. I've been saying for a long time that once a customer starts using
FIO's APIs to optimize performance (by xN - where N can be any number from 2 to
10) it means that competing PCIe SSDs look less attractive - even if they have
spot performance specs which are faster. Rick agreed that this assessment is
correct - and reminded me that several years ago he had described Fusion-io to
me as a "software company". From the business point of view it's good
for Fusion-io's business - but also good for FIO's business partners - because
as the catalog of VSL
compatible APIs and applets grows - they can get more powerful functionality for
lower incremental development cost.
So what can you do with an Octal
powered server that you couldn't do before?
One trivial example is
that if you add some dedupe,
compression and an iSCSI
stack you can easily create a 1U storage appliance with maybe 100TB to 200TB
of fast virtual storage which (because of the low latency) will run rings
around similar bulk storage SSDs which use
2.5" SSDs in
RAID.
The
general availability of denser PCIe SSDs - which we'll see across the whole
market next year -
means that servers will grow up to be faster a lot sooner than they have been
doing in the past decade. |
 |
And having 10x faster servers
always creates new markets which weren't viable before. | | | |
| . |
|
|
| . |
| sugaring MLC for the
enterprise |
When flash SSDs started to be used as
enterprise server accelerators in 2004 - competing
RAM SSD makers said
flash wasn't reliable
enough.
RAM SSDs had been used for server speedups
since 1976
- and in 2004 they owned the enterprise market. (Before 2004 - flash SSDs
weren't fast enough and had mostly been used as rugged storage in the
military and
industrial
markets - and in space
constrained civilian products such as smartphones.)
By 2007 it was
clear that the endurance
of SLC flash was more than good enough to survive in high
IOPS server
caches. And in the ensuing years the debate about enterprise flash SSDs shifted
to MLC - because when systems integrators put early cheap consumer grade SSDs
into arrays - guess what happened? They burned out within a few months - exactly
as predicted.
Since 2009 new
controller
technologies and the combined market experience of enterprise MLC pioneers
like Fusion-io and
SandForce have
demonstrated that with the right management - MLC can survive in most (but
still not all) fast SSDs.
Now as we head into 1X nanometer flash
generations new technical challenges are arising and MLC SSD makers disagree
about which is the best way to implement enterprise MLC SSDs.
Which
type of so called "enterprise MLC" is best? Can you believe the
contradictory marketing claims? Can you even understand the arguments? (Probably
not.)
And that's why marketing is going to play a bigger part in the
next round of enterprise SSD wars as SSD companies wave their wands and reveal
more about the magic inside their SSD engines to audiences who don't really
understand half of what they're being told. |
|
| | |
| . |
| finally
SANward bound... Fusion-io inside Kaminario's K2 |
Editor:- September 13, 2011 -
Kaminario
announced
it has integrated Fusion-io's
PCIe SSDs as a new
option in its
K2
FC SAN compatible SSD
product line (which was until now
RAM SSD only) to
provide flash and
hybrid storage
options.
Using the new options the K2 can provide from 3 to 30TB of
non-stop, protected and self healing, blade server based flash storage in 4U
to 12U of rack space with R/W latency of 260 / 150 microseconds at a list price
of $30K / TB.
Editor's comments:- You may be wondering -
what do I mean by my headline? - the "finally SANward bound" part?
Well
- when Fusion-io came to market -
4 years ago
(September 25, 2007) - a lot of the publicity following their launch talked
about their product being a SAN SSD.
Of course it wasn't - but it was
just their way of communicating with simple editors and analysts who didn't
know any better - that they were in the enterprise SSD market space. Because at
that time (in 2007) the SAN market was already
13 years old and well
understood - whereas the PCIe
SSD market wasn't. |
 |
Nowdays many other
companies also sell Fusion-io inside - for example 3 server companies whose
names are composed of 2, 3 and 4 letter words / acronyms - but the K2 is the
first time that Fusion-io's ioMemory modules have appeared in a collaboratively
designed and marketed - unashamedly
FC SAN storage product. | | | |
| . |
| "...There's no
reason Fusion-io
should've come out in front of us, and we are catching up..." |
| ...EMC's President and COO -
Pat
Gelsinger (August 31, 2011) in an article by
SiliconANGLE.com
re flash in storage arrays. | | |
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| the 3 fastest PCIe
SSDs? |
Are you tied up in
knots trying to shortlist flash SSD accelerators ranked according to
published comparative benchmarks?
You know the sort of thing I mean -
where a magazine compares 10 SSDs or a blogger compares 2 SSDs against each
other. It would be nice to have a shortlist so that you don't have to waste too
much of your own valuable time testing unsuitable candidates wouldn't it?
StorageSearch's long running
fastest SSDs directory
typically indicates 1 main product in each form factor category but those
examples may not be compatible with your own ecosystem.
If so a
new article -
the 3 fastest PCIe
SSDs list (or is it really lists?) may help you cut that Gordian
knot. Hmm... you may be thinking that StorageSearch's editor never gives easy
answers to SSD questions if more complicated ones are available.
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But in this case you'd be
wrong. (I didn't say you'd like the answers, though.) ...read the article | | | |
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| the Top 20 SSD companies |
Editor:- Which companies do
you absolutely have to include in your thinking if you've got any new
projects involving SSDs?
And which SSD companies are most likely
to succeed?
With hundreds of manufacturers already in the SSD
market - and hundreds
more soon to enter
- you have to know where you should prioritize your valuable time and
attention. |
|
For over 4 years
StorageSearch.com has published the
quarterly list of the Top SSD companies - which has accurately predicted the
ebbs and flows of existing vendors and has been sensitive enough to recognize
the industry's new rising stars....read the article | | | |
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