Wozniak Exits 'Quiet Life,' Joins Storage Startup Fusion-io (
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The Apple co-founder and chief technologist hooks up with a Salt Lake City-based company that makes compact NAND flash storage arrays. Wozniak will be chief scientist after serving as a Fusion-io board member. His schedule starts immediately.So The Woz is officially back in the real world of day-to-day IT strategy
and operations.
Steve Wozniak, co-founder and former chief technologist of Apple
Computer, revealed Feb. 4 that he is coming out of semi-retirement and
joining Fusion-io, a Salt Lake City-based storage startup that makes compact
NAND flash storage arrays, as its chief scientist.
Wozniak, 59, has been serving as a Fusion-io board member for the last year
and decided he wanted to get more involved with what the company is doing. His
schedule starts immediately, a company spokesman told eWEEK.
Fusion-io ioDrive is the
first direct-attached, solid-state server storage array that uses PCI-Express
(PCIe) connectivity. The ioDrive is smallbarely larger than a typical handheld
devicethat uses advanced NAND flash chip clustering to perform the same
functions as a spinning desk storage array, only with much faster read/write
performance and with much less power draw.
120K Read/Write IOPS?
The company claims ioDrive is capable of 120,000 random read/write IOPSabout
100 times faster than a typical SATA (serial ATA) drive.
PCIe (PCI Express) was introduced by Intel in 2004. It is a computer expansion
card standard based on point-to-point serial links rather than a shared
parallel bus architecture, and is designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP
standards.
Many industry observers believe SSD-powered
drives are the wave of the future in storage arrays and in laptops. eWEEK has covered this extensively in the last
several years.
Wozniak will act as a key technical adviser to the Fusion-io research and
development group. Naturally, the company also will trade heavily on his name
and reputation in helping it move into major global accounts.
"Steve Wozniak has been among the most elite innovators of his age, and
we are honored by his enthusiasm for our technology and our company," Don
Basile, CEO of Fusion-io, said in a press
statement.
"Steve's inventions and insights have inspired generations of IT
professionals, and we look forward to the influence he will have on the future
direction of Fusion-io as we continue to transform the enterprise."