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IO Turbine was founded by an exceptional executive team with decades of
experience in the high tech industry at companies such as EMC, NetApp, Oracle,
and Sun Microsystems.
see also:-
IO
Turbine - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com
- editor's comments:- October 2011 -
IO Turbine was 1 of 2
software companies to enter the top 20 SSD companies list - for the first time -
based on search volume stats in the 3rd quarter of 2011. It would have entered
in its own right just as it got acquired by Fusion-io.
Earlier
comments:- May 2011 - IO Turbine is designing software for high
IOPS virtual flash SSD environments. They recently secured $7.75 million in
funding.
I classify their product as belonging to the
SSD ASAP market
(Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage) which includes a diverse range of
companies which offer solutions ranging from software only, to SSD with software
and software with SSD embedded in hard disk arrays.
What all these
products are trying to deliver (in environments from
notebooks
to enterprise SANs) is to
get software automated tuning of data hot spots within a hybrid storage
environment (with high ratios of HDD to SSD capacity) to optimize SSD
utilization and acceleration - without the cost of having a pure solid state
environment. Traditionally this type of tuning has been done by expensive
humans who are SSD experts.
Although the ASAP market started out as a
tool to leverage legacy installed storage (and products) - there will be even
greater need for such tools in future environments which are 100% solid state
(circa 2016 to
2020)
- because the ratio of fastest to slowest (archive) SSD in the population
will be several orders of magnitude. And it will always be more
economic to use a
mixture of SSD speeds in the enterprise than to bring all SSDs up to a common
level. It will be more reliable
too.
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In May 2011 -
IO Turbine
announced that its flash SSD supporting acceleration software for VMware
environments was available for beta testing.
I probed into the
company's claim that its Accelio works with all types of flash SSD - because it
seemed to me that it might work well with some types and not very effectively
with others. This is the reply I got from a company spokesperson.
"Thanks
for your question Zsolt. You are correct in that a
PCIe device will be
faster than a SAS/SATA device and that is a
function of the device, not Accelio. Accelio will work the same regardless.
Accelio is Flash and SSD agnostic and will work with any of these devices. The
value of Accelio is that is can utilize any of these devices within the host to
accelerate virtualized applications without sacrificing the ability to vMotion
to another host if desired. The performance delta, and hence the value
proposition, for Accelio is based on solid state devices in the host versus
spindles over the network. Lastly, if for some reason the Flash/SSD device were
to become slower than the primary, we will send the I/O directly to the primary
storage."
In August 2011 -
Fusion-io announced
that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire
IO Turbine for
approximately $95 million.
In October 2011 - StorageSearch.com
revealed that IO Turbine
was 1 of 2 software companies to enter the top 20 SSD companies list - for the
first time - based on search volume stats in the 3rd quarter of 2011. It would
have entered in its own right just as it got acquired by Fusion-io. |
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| Fusion-io
acquires IO Turbine |
Editor:- August 5, 2011 - Fusion-io yesterday
announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire IO Turbine for
approximately $95 million.
David Flynn, Chairman and CEO of
Fusion-io. "We believe integrating ioMemory and IO Turbine adds a critical
and previously missing performance component to virtualized IT environments that
will accelerate the adoption of Fusion-io technology. This acquisition also
underscores our focus on providing customers with an enterprise solution that
features software and hardware components designed to accelerate their business'
full suite of applications."
Fusion-io also
reported
revenue of $72 million for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2011, more than 6x
as much as the year ago quarter in 2010 and up 7% from from the prior
quarter.
Editor's comments:- these are the first financial
results reported by Fusion-io since it became a publicly listed company. The
results - and the company's decision to acquire an
SSD ASAP software
company together confirm and validate the company's strong showing in our
predictive top 10 SSD
companies list in recent years. The
SSD market has
become a serious business - and is no longer just about how cleverly a bunch of
electronics guys can tame a bunch of unruly memory chips and make them play
hard drive tricks. | | |
| . |
"Enterprise
Flash" - is a market phenomenon
not a technology. |
| Sugaring flash for
the enterprise
- describes - how the market changed from 2004 to 2013 and how views
about the reliability of SLC, eMLC, MLC, TLC etc were at first painfully
learned and then later discarded. | | | |
| IO
Turbine gets funding for SSD IOPSware
|
Editor:- April 19, 2011 - IO Turbine is a new
(to me)
storage software
company which is designing software for
high IOPS
virtual flash SSD environments.
The company popped out of stealth
mode
today
and announced it has secured $7.75 million in funding led by Lightspeed
Venture Partners, as well as Merus Capital and notable angel investors.
Editor's
comments:- I don't write much about startup software companies any more
after tracking hundreds of them with business plans which rarely went beyond
the aspiration to get acquired. There's a big reality gap between "hello
world!" and GOOG.
There haven't been many startup software
companies with anything interesting to say about the SSD market. The only other
one that springs to mind is
NVELO - who announced
their intention last summer to launch an
ASAP like software
suite for the notebook
SSD market.
IO Turbine's
team comes from an
impressive array of heavyweight enterprise companies. I asked some basic
questions about the company's business plans today and you can see the answers
in
IO Turbine's profile page.
These
are the answers I got to some questions I asked (April 19, 2011).
Q.
What's IO Turbine's planned route to market? - is it licensing your
software to SSD oems?
A. Yes, OEMs and direct
Q. Where are you in terms of product availability?
A.
Shipping in August 2011.
Q. Is your product aimed as an
acclerator for HDD arrays?
A.
No
Q. Or is it aimed at pure flash SSD environment?
A.
Pure Flash | | |
