September 26th, 2007 by ketyung
A piece of PCI card introduced at DEMOfall 07 by Fusion-io could be the next big thing in storage. Or at least it’s something we need to know here in order to catch up with the rapid change. The card as shown in the picture is a NAND flash PCI Express card that offers up 640 gigabytes of storage and with the speed as fast as a DRAM that is many thousand times faster than your disk drive.
This piece of PCI Express card is called ioDrive, which could be used within the enterprise to replace SAN. It doesn’t need any RAID controller and has the benefit of no moving parts that would consume less power. The best use would be within servers meant for applications that involve heavy processing, intensive I/O tasks or apps need more virtual machines per server.
Transaction rates definitely will increase a lot, by 25 times as NAND is more directly attached to the heart of the computer. The company even claimed that this technology is 200 times better than Ultra SCSI, SAS, 2 GBPS FC (Fiber Channel) and Solid State Disks for sustained data rates and 8K random reads. You’ll get to see this technology in HP’s BladeSystems as the two have formed a strategic alliance. Pricing is around $30 per gigabyte retail and this is definitely a much more economical one compared to any SCSI or SAN solution etc. Comparison chart provided by Fusion-io after the jump.
SAN,Storage Area Network,Ultra SCSI,ioDrive,Enterprise storage,Fusion-IO,ioDrive to replace SAN
Technorati Tags: SAN, Storage Area Network, Ultra SCSI, ioDrive, Enterprise storage, Fusion-IO, ioDrive to replace SAN
Stumble it!
October 9th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Slick, but whose going to pay $30 a gig?
October 10th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
I don’t think this is for the average person. Its for companies who need very fast access to memory or other specific uses. And besides, when the prices go down (which they will), this could replace traditional hard drives or maybe act as a secondary RAM or other memory device.
October 13th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Full Circle…
My first PC had a Hard Card - a 20 mb hard drive that plugged into the ISA expansion bus. Good times.
October 16th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
“It doesn’t need any RAID controller and has the benefit of no moving parts that would consume less power..”
My hypothesis is:
Now the RAID will be on the System Board and instead of a HDD RAID controller it will be a PCI-IOBOARD controller… Otherwise how are you going to provide protection against this board failure?
You must have at least 2 of this boards and an integrated “PCI-RAID†controller onboard to make this hardware fault tolerant… “PCI-RAID 1â€â€¦
January 1st, 2008 at 4:57 am
[...] remember the Fusion ioDrive? A piece of PCIe card that was deemed to replace SAN storage for the enterprise use. Now, there is [...]
August 16th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Motherboards will have to be provided with more pci e slots. If storage devices could be that fast it might not be necessary to have ddr memory
anymore thus simplifying pc architecture design. I would also like to see notebooks’ PCMCIA slots to be upgraded to PCI-e specification so we would could use this type of storage as a backup or extra storage device. Hope to see this technolgy in the mainstream soon.