Fusion-io stuffs workstation storage into bulging hand luggage
The Register UK by Dan Olds
Dual-GPUs, 3GB/sec I/O and fits in overhead bin
Fusion-io nabbed prime real estate on the GTC 2012 exhibit floor – right inside the entryway. They took advantage of it by offering a hosted oxygen bar, complete with an oxygen bartender and a wide selection of coloured/flavoured airs. I got the lowdown on their offerings (it's hospital grade oxygen – something I insist upon) before talking to Vince Brisebois, industry manager for Fusion's high performance group and product manager for its new ioFX workstation SSD.
Oops… they don’t like to use the ‘D’ part of ‘SSD’. As Brisebois says in the video below, it’s not really a drive; ioFX is direct (PCI-e) attached, non-volatile memory designed to drive apps to maximum performance.
Since there are no controllers or control protocols to go through, latency is extremely low even when compared to speedy SSDs. According to Brisebois, typical SSD latency is around 1 millisecond, while ioFX latency is 0.04 milliseconds – much closer to RAM speeds.
At 420GB, it’s big enough to handle large jobs, and read bandwidth of 1.5GB/sec means that it can keep up with high performance apps like video transcoding much better than other workstation storage solutions. read more...
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