Fusion-io, the non-volatile memory company which has Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its Chief Scientist, has announced that IBM will use the company's high-speed memory technology in its servers.
Fusion-io has licensed its NAND flash technology, which it calls ioMemory, to IBM as the basis for an SSD storage appliance called IOPS (I/O Operations per Second) Adapter which aims to reduce I/O bottlenecks in IBM's System x server line.
IBM says: 'The High IOPS SSD PCIe Adapter is the world's most advanced NAND clustering technology, with performance comparable to DRAM and storage capacity on par with today's hard disks - giving you the power to improve both memory capacity and storage performance a thousand fold. The Adapter unleashes such a dramatic performance increase that every server can easily contain the I/O performance of the world's fastest enterprise SAN.'
Although too expensive for main storage, Fusion-io's memory technology's speed 3.2 GB/s of sustained bandwidth, with 50 microseconds latency, makes it useful for active memory. This helps in data-intensive processing applications such as financial services, 3-D renderings, heavy duty graphics and social media.
"In today's data centre, systems running everything from on-line commerce to medical records are being asked to manage massive amounts of data," says Robert Galush, vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group, "working with Fusion-io, System x servers are delivering technology that optimises these data-heavy workloads, allowing systems to not only handle the increases, but do so more efficiently."
Fusion-io's SSD called ioDrive uses PCI-Express. It is said to be is capable of 120,000 random read/write IOPS (I/O Operations Per Second) which is about 100 times faster than normal HDDs.
"In addition to the data performance improvements and industry-leading reliability, IBM customers have the ability to significantly reduce capital equipment, floor space and power consumed by their data centre operations, enabling innovation at all levels of the data centre architecture," says David Flynn, CTO and president of Fusion-io.