Cloud Hosting Blog

DEMOFall 07 witnessed the introduction of some fantastic innovations including Fusion-IO’s NAND flash PCI Express card. This revolutionary technology essentially replaces disc drives for data centers and workstations. The company literature and several reviews claim the card is up to 1000 times faster than a hard drive.

The new drive has no need for RAID controllers, is nearly as fast as RAM, has no moving parts, stores up to 640 gigabytes of data and essentially reduces the size of a SAN (storage area network) to that of a PCI Express card. This technology promises to be the future of storage itself according to many experts. In a nutshell, the Fusion IO operates at almost RAM speeds with huge storage capacities and plug-n-play simplicity.

So What Is A SAN Anyway?
A storage area network is an architecture type for attaching remote computer devices such as disc arrays and tape libraries so that an operating system sees them as attached locally. Essentially, a SAN connects a series of “Islands” of stored data together using a high speed network. Obviously, greater storage capacity, speed and a small profile makes these connections more efficient.

Fusion IO – Photo Courtesy, ZDNet

The down side of this new Fusion “wonder drive” is the price, which is about 100 times more expensive than any traditional hardware. Speed is really the big deal in with the “IO” for obvious reasons – anything 1000 times faster in a network is going to ramp the system up, but at $100 per gigabyte don’t look to install these on your home PC just yet.

Simplified, Streamlined and Powerful
According to the site literature the new Fusion io is available in various storage capacities from 40GB to 640GB. Another one of the big pluses for this fantastic new drive is that there is no interference with your current infrastructure or applications, so installation and switching are relatively simple compared to other storage schemes.

For raw speed, storage capacity and ease of installation it looks like the Fusion IO is hard to beat save the price tag. 1000 times faster with half the complexity says a great deal about an innovation! This is really a sensational new development that we hope will filter down to individual users and of course find its way into our servers.