Robin Wauters

Fusion-io, a provider of enterprise solid-state technology and high-performance I/O solutions, today announced (PDF) that the company is working with IBM to dramatically accelerate data access performance in IBM’s clustered storage systems. The two companies have adapted Fusion-io’s enterprise SSD technology for “Project Quicksilver,” demonstrating increased data access performance and reduced power consumption, while dramatically reducing latency and bottlenecks that tend to be compounded in today’s high transaction and virtualized environments.

Combining Fusion-io’s silicon-based, NAND flash storage technology with IBM’s storage technology and system and application expertise will revolutionize how enterprises access and store large amounts of data, enabling a new performance standard that addresses the growing demands from virtualization, as well as high-transaction and data-intensive I/O applications. This powerful combination will provide customers with a whole new way to architect their high performance storage needs with unparalleled performance, flexibility and scalability, while consuming far less power.

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. The ioMemory technology from Fusion-io 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.