Fusion-IO has a unique approach to Solid State Drives by working PCI Express-based devices that can draw advantage from the much higher bandwidth offered by this interface. SATA may be more userfriendly, especially today, but PCIe offers enormous performance potential with transfer rates up to 800MB/s. Fusion-IO has been targeting the business market with its previous drives, but has now announced a 80GB ioXtreme model for the enthusiasts and the demanding gamers. The MSRP will be below $1,000 and should hit the market in Q1.
Press release follows;
Fusion-io Puts Ultra-High-Performance Data Storage into Hands of High-End PC Users with the ioXtreme
Fusion-io Announces Its First Consumer Product at E for All
LOS ANGELES, OCTOBER 3, 2008—— – Fusion-io, a leading provider of solid state technology and high-performance I/O solutions, unveiled its first consumer product, the ioXtreme, at the E for All conference and expo. The ioXtreme brings high-end PC users 80 GB of PCI-Expressbased, high-performance, solid state storage that was designed for the world’s fastest supercomputers.
“Imagine working on complex 3-D graphics, unzipping and manipulating massive files even installing a new application—all at the same time,” said David Flynn, CTO of Fusion-io. “Suddenly, with the ioXtreme, tasks that would have brought your system to its knees are no longer limited by the disks spinning loudly inside your box.”
Mechanical disk drive technology, inspired by Edison’s phonograph and originally invented over forty years ago, hasn’t kept up with the performance of today’s PCs. Multi-core CPU’s that perform tens of billions of instructions per second sit needlessly idle waiting for disks to access files. The seemingly endless delays starting applications, manipulating large files or doing just about anything that involves moving data to or from disk can now be a thing of the past. The new memory tier offered with the ioXtreme closes this performance gap, allowing PC users to utilize disk drives for what they do best—providing inexpensive, high-capacity archival storage.
Drawing from Fusion-io’s catalogue of industry leading solid state storage technologies, the ioXtreme adapts some of the company’s most exciting innovations to bring a revolutionary consumer product to the high-performance storage market. With the ioXtreme, extreme PC users get a memory-speed storage device that has been engineered to exponentially accelerate file access and meet their demanding performance needs.
The ioXtreme will be priced at under $1000 and be available for home and consumer use in Q1, 2009. For more information on Fusion-io and the ioXtreme, visit www.fusionio.com.
About Fusion-io
Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, Fusion-io (www.fusionio.com) is a leading provider of enterprise solid-state technology and high-performance I/O solutions that unlock a world of possibilities for performance-starved applications, closing the gap between processing power and storage performance.
The increasing demand for a next generation solid state storage technology is driven by advancements in computer processors which, following Moore’s Law, have grown exponentially in performance. Mechanical disks, on the other hand, follow Newtonian Dynamics and experience lackluster performance improvements, introducing a performance gap. Ushering in a new era of silicon-based storage, Fusion-io offers several magnitudes of breakthrough performance at a fraction of the cost of today’s traditional disk-based storage systems. The company’s ioMemory architecture creates a new tier in the memory hierarchy – one that has 100 times the capacity density and 10 times the capacity per dollar of DRAM. NAND flash-based ioMemory makes it possible to have terabytes of near-memory-speed storage within each node – bringing extremely large memory problems and I/O bound analysis to a new level of cost effectiveness.
