Fusion-io doubles flash card's speed, capacity; halves price

Computerworld - Fusion-io today released the first upgrade to its in-server NAND flash card, the ioDrive2, doubling the card's speed, bandwidth and density, while maintaining its resiliency and endurance.

Fusion-io actually took the new ioDrive2 performance and flipped it on its head, creating a data write speed that's actually faster than the read speed, according to Fusion-io CEO David Flynn.

The new ioDrive2 Duo (a full-height card) has 3GBps total bandwidth, offering up to 700,000 read I/Os per second (IOPS) and over 900,000 write IOPS.

The ioDrive2 PCIe flash card

Fusion ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo will be offered in 365GB, 785GB, 1.2TB and 2.4TB capacities. General availability will begin in November. Pricing for Fusion's new ioMemory platform starts at a suggested retail price of $5,950. "The list price just over $11 a gigabyte," Flynn said.

By comparison, Fusion-io's first generation ioDrive Duo offered up to 1.5GBps throughput and capacity from 320GB to 1.2TB. That drive sells for $28,871 for a 1.2TB card on Pricegrabber.com, or roughly $24 a gigabyte.

Fusion-io upgraded several things on the new PCIe flash card, including shrinking the circuitry from more than 50 nanometers (nms) to a lithography in the 20-nm range. Fusion-io uses multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash from multiple vendors with varying circuitry sizes, including chips from Micron/Intel, Samsung, Toshiba and SanDisk.

The company also upgraded its controller's firmware with a self-healing feature called Adaptive FlashBack that provides chip-level fault tolerance, which enables ioMemory to repair itself after a single chip or a multi-chip failure without interrupting application performance.

The PCIe flash cards now also support all major operating systems, including Windows, Linux, OSX, Solaris x86, ESXi 5.0 and HP-UX.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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