The Woz speaks: Fusion-io plans IPO

Privately-owned server flash card vendor Fusion-io is planning to go public, according to its chief scientist, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Fusion-io's ioMemory technology adds flash chips to a PCIe card that becomes an intermediate tier of memory between a server's DRAM and its hard drives, accelerating server applications …

[Dwayne]

Just another title

Fusion IO is just another form of DAS. Freeing up captured (DAS) storage is one of the fundamental benefits of a SAN.... FusionIO is only fast and accessible to the server its installed in... Might as well stick it in a storage array and throw some tiering software at it.

[amanfromearth]

WOZ that?

Is that a spare pacemaker battery the Woz has on his wrist?

[Anonymous Coward]

title schmitle

Its a nixie tube watch.

amanfrommars, could you please stop making sense. Did you catch a Watson upgrade?

[amanfromearth]

I'm not from mars

And I'm not an E.T.

I'm a T.

[RichardB]

@dwayne

Guessing you've never tried it then?

The sheer speed and responsiveness outweighs so many of the drawbacks it is just not funny.

[Tim Jenkins]

All hail the ubergeek!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube

[Pahhh]

@Dwayne

Fairly silly statement there Dwayne. Yes its another form of DAS but nothing wrong with DAS. Putting things on SAN doesnt make anything faster and the whole purpose of the FusionIO stuff is to make random data accesses incredibly quick. Its not just because its solid state its fast, its also incredibly fast because there isnt a traditional interface like FC SCSI / SAS /etc . The device is directly attached to the motherboard bus thereby having massive transfer rates and small propergation delays.

Good for lower volume datasets that require amazingly good performance. Databases which typically arent huge are a great candidate for this.

Obviously due to cost, not ideal for large file servers.

[Storage_Person]

More Than That

What if you want to use your data in a clustered environment? What if you want it mirrored for resiliency? What if you want it replicated for disaster recovery? What sort of downtime is involved in increasing the capacity? The downsides of DAS were never about speed, they were about manageability. This is even more true in a virtualized world.

People who say Fusion-IO is storage are technically accurate but you won't find any sane business holding their primary copy of business-critical data on it. This stuff is basically another type of cache.

So will it supplement SANs? Yes. Will it supplant them? No.

[Dwayne]

Just another title...

What problem are we trying to solve? The issue is SAS/SATAx is not as fast as PCI Express... Fix the bus with a Universal bus technology and FusionIO is relegated to the bit bucket... Watch this space for Universal/High Speed bus technologies!

[Pahhh]

@storage_person

No-one was saying it is there to replace SANs did they? The purpose of stuff like Fusion-IO is to get a massive performance increase for certain applications.

SANs and SAN attached RAIDs are great workhorses but it doesnt necessarily make it the best fit for all application.

You are also making a nieve assumption that the only way to get redudancy is through storage. There are other ways. Applications like Casandra for instance, manage redudancy by having different nodes each deciding how often and where data is replicated. This provides massive scalability for both performance and capacity. In fact, using a SAN for such a system creates an unnecessary amount of complexity and greater chance of failure.

" Will it supplant them? No."

So this statement is Yes for certain applications but No for general use.

[cosmo the enlightened]

But why did they not

just use SMARTDRV.exe with EMM386 in the config.sys file?

That is chaching tecknology...

...shurely some mistake here...

[Corey V.]

Fusion Scam

That article should read - "The company's products are regretfully used by server vendors Dell, HP and IBM, and customers such as Facebook, MySpace and Zappos".

All those companies are trying to back out of the Write Cliff Error that Fusion has or inability to Hot Swap. They are running from the product. Fusion is trying to issue an IPO to reap whatever bit they can before they crash. The technology is not sustainable. They are far behind other products that are now out.