Enabling Innovation

By Rick White, Chief Marketing Officer of Fusion-io
Volume 4, 2008

While the current economic slowdown is proving a struggle for many businesses, it has conversely offered many opportunities for companies that empower IT organizations to reduce costs through innovation. In architecting next-generation datacenters, for example, enterprises are evaluating new technologies that are pushing previously accepted limitations. Innovators are rethinking every aspect of their infrastructure and developing new strategies to improve efficiency and reduce demands on energy and budget. One area that’s ripe for real change is storage.

For most companies, the amount of data that must be processed, distributed, and archived is growing at an incredible rate. Data mining, online transaction processing, compliance and high-volume content creation require unprecedented levels of storage capacity. Fortunately, capacity is relatively cheap. Disk drives have improved exponentially over the years in terms of sheer data volume, but have not kept pace with processing speeds and throughput. Unfortunately, the mechanical “head” on a disk drive, following Newtonians Law, has physical limitations. This puts a strain on today’s compute-intensive environments, which require dozens-to-hundreds of disk drives to balance the performance of a single CPU. This storage configuration currently represents the weakest link in the IT performance chain. New possibilities emerge, however, when companies are willing to consider how they tier their storage and imagine how they could improve storage performance.  New technology from Fusion-IO can help.

Fusion-io has developed the world’s most advanced NAND clustering technology used in its enterprise flash storage solutions. Designed around a revolutionary silicon-based storage architecture known as ioMemory, the company’s first product, the ioDrive, plugs into existing infrastructure as a standard PCI Express adapter, putting the I/O performance of hundreds of mechanical disks directly on the system bus. For even more performance, redundancy, and capacity, multiple ioDrive cards can be RAIDed together, effectively allowing the ioDrive to scale into terabytes of capacity, millions of I/Os per second (IOPS), and gigabytes of sustained bandwidth—all from a zero footprint solution that is easily deployed into existing servers.

With the I/O performance of hundreds of hard drives, the ioDrive can sustain 125,000 random IOPS. For example, with only two ioDrives installed in a server, 1.5 gigabytes per second of bandwidth can be sustained. With this kind of performance improvement, every server can deliver I/O performance comparable to the world's fastest enterprise SAN. The I/O performance of multiple storage racks of high performance disk drives can now be achieved on a single PCIe card with the ioDrive, dramatically improving operational expenditures (OPEX). This means new levels of data access performance, reduced OPEX, and huge energy efficiency improvements represent true innovation, giving customers the power to truly innovate.

The ioDrive is ideal for transaction and performance-intensive environments. Currently, many companies – including more than 50 of the Fortune 100 companies – are deploying the technology to solve a number of different problems caused by the performance gap between CPUs and mechanical disk drives. Customers are adopting the technology to improve the performance of transactional databases, content caching, data-warehousing, exchange servers, and financial simulation, to name a few. In addition, industry leaders like HP are working with Fusion-io to integrate this new solid-state storage technology into its enterprise servers.

Leading organizations know that the next generation of IT storage will require performance. Our technology represents a radical departure from traditional solutions but will, I believe, change what businesses expect from their storage architecture. Around the world, enterprises are aggressively adopting innovative technologies like the Fusion-io ioDrive to save money on power, cooling, and improve application performance. For companies that empower customers to innovate, this technology affords them a competitive advantage in the marketplace

 

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