Fusion plays its card: The Ten of Terabytes

Fusion-io has crammed eight ioDrive flash modules on one PCIe card to give servers 10TB of app-accelerating flash.

This follows on from its second generation ioDrives: PCIe-connected flash cards using single level cell and multi-level cell flash to provide from 400GB to 2.4TB of flash memory, which can be used by applications to get stored data many times faster than from disk. By putting eight 1.28TB multi-level cell ioDrive 2 modules on a single wide ioDrive Octal PCIe card Fusion reaches a 10TB capacity level.

It delivers more than 1.3 million (512 byte block) IOPS with 6.7 GB/sec bandwidth

David Flynn, Fusion-io's chairman and CEO, said this enlargement of the ioDrive Octal's previous 5.12TB capacity was a good idea because it enabled: "customers to accelerate even very large data sets ... Previously, a 4U server could contain 10 ioDrive Duos for 20 TB of total capacity, but now up to four 10 TB ioDrive Octals can be integrated into a 4U server, such as the HP ProLiant DL585 G7, delivering 40 TB of total capacity."

The Octal card is for read-intensive workloads and offers capacities similar to those found in networked memory arrays, such as Violin Memory's 40TB 3010.

The bulked-up ioDrive Octal is aimed at data warehousing, scale-out architectures, research and supercomputing applications, and will be available in the first quarter of 2012. ®