Fusion-io unveils SSD drives with 1.5GB throughput, 1.2TB capacity

Computerworld - Fusion-io today announced what it is calling the fastest server-based solid-state drive on the market today, with double the slot capacity of its older PCI Express-based ioDrive.

Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io claims the ioDrive Duo offers users unprecedented single server performance levels with 1.5GB/sec. throughput and almost 200,000 IOPS. The system can reach such performance levels because four ioDrive Duos in a single server can scale linearly, which provides up to 6GB/sec. of read bandwidth and over 500,000 read IOPS.

Currently, the cards come in 160GB, 320GB and 640GB capacities. A 1.28TB card is expected out in the second half of this year.

The ioDrive Duo
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"Many database and system administrators are finding that SANs are too expensive and don't meet performance, protection and capacity utilization expectations," said David Flynn, chief technology officer at Fusion-io. "This is why more and more application vendors are moving toward application-centric solid-state storage. The ioDrive Duo offers the enterprise the advantages of application-centric storage without application-specific programming."

The ioDrive Duo is based on PCI Express x8 or PCI Express 2.0 x4 standards, which can sustain up to 20Gbit/sec. raw throughput. The drive's sustained read rate is 1,500MB/sec. (using a 32KB packet size) and a sustained write rate of 1,400MB/sec.

The ioDrive Duo offers reliability with triple redundancy of parts for a single storage component; multibit error detection and correction; chip-level N+1 redundancy; and on-board self-healing so that no servicing is required, the company said.

The drives also offer optional RAID -1 mirroring two ioMemory modules on the same ioDrive Duo, offering complete redundancy on a single PCIe card.

The ioDrive Duo will be available in April 2009.

The company said that pricing for the new drives will be announced later. The current offerings are priced at "well under $30 per usable GB," it noted.