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Video: Fusion-io demos 768 DVDs playing from one solid-state drive

Fusion-io's ioSAN PCIe card boasts gigabyte-plus read/write speeds

By Lucas Mearian

April 9, 2009 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - ORLANDO -- Solid-state disk vendor Fusion-io set up a high-profile display of flash memory power at this week's Storage Networking World by displaying 768 DVD-quality video streams from a single SSD on a high-definition television monitor.

Fusion-io cobbled together a video display made up of a dozen 50-in. high-definition LCD televisions onto which the 768 DVDs were streamed at the same time from the company's new ioSAN PCIe card. Looking like a massive, pixelated TV screen, the video display showed everything from episodes of Lost and Stargate SG-I to movies such as Star Wars. The duo card being displayed, which used two separate SSD modules, had 640GB of single-layer cell (SLC) NAND flash memory, and was connected to 12 diskless Hewlett-Packard servers with quad-core, quad-socket CPUs, an InfiniBand backbone, Nvidia graphics cards and two 10 Gigabit Ethernet network switches. A high-performance PC workstation served as the host to the SSD.

Fusion-io systems architect Joshua Aune said the ioSAN card could have stored 2,500 DVD-quality movies, and it will be set up to stream 1,024 videos at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in two weeks in Las Vegas.

The ioSAN 320GB PCIe card boasts a 1.5GB/sec. read speed and 1.4GB/sec. write speed with 32k packets or 186,000 IOPS for reads and 167,000 IOPS for writes using 4k packets. The card also comes in a 640GB version with lower-performance multilayer cell NAND flash chips. The company plans to release with a 1.28TB version in the second half of this year.

According to the company, the ioSAN technology "can be used as networked, server-attached storage or integrated into networked storage infrastructure, making fundamental changes to the enterprise storage area."

Fusion-io's SSD streaming 768 DVDs at the same time

Fusion-io's ioSAN supports Windows, Linux and Solaris. Pricing of the product is not yet available, but Fusion-io CEO David Bradford said it will sell for about $15-$25 per gigabyte.

Fusion-io just revamped its management team to include former Apple developer Steve Wozniak and this week landed $47.5 million Series B funding round from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Read more about Storage in Computerworld's Storage Topic Center.

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