Fusion-io Doubles Capacity of Its SSD Storage Array

Fusion-io, which makes handheld-size solid-state storage arrays for enterprise systems, launched March 12 a new product called ioDrive Duo, which doubles the capacity of Fusion-io's PCI Express-based ioDrive storage array.

The company is billing the ioDrive Duo as the "fastest server-based solid-state storage" package available.

Performance for multiple ioDrive Duos scales linearly, the company said, allowing an enterprise IT system to scale performance to 6GB per second of read bandwidth and more than 500,000-read IOPS by using four ioDrive Duos, Fusion-io CTO David Flynn said.

Based on PCI Express x8 or PCI Express 2.0 x4 standards, which can sustain up to 20GB per second of raw throughput, the ioDrive Duo can sustain 1.5GB per second of read bandwidth and nearly 200,000 read IOPS.

Performance metrics, according to Fusion-io, are:

• Sustained read bandwidth: 1,500MB/sec (32K packet size)

• Sustained write bandwidth: 1,400MB/sec (32K packet size)

• Read IOPS: 186,000 (4K packet size)

• Write IOPS: 167,000 (4K packet size)

• Latency < 50 ??üsec

The ioDrive Duo comes in the following capacities: 160GB, 320GB, 640GB and 1.28TB.  Delivery of the latter will be in the second half of 2009.

Fusion-io has been making news lately. Nine days ago it announced an OEM deal with Hewlett-Packard to provide the huge systems company with its new StorageWorks IO Accelerator. The IO Accelerator is a NAND flash-based storage adapter based on Fusion-io's ioMemory technology.

Last month, the Salt Lake City-based company signed Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist.

The ioDrive Duo will be available in April 2009. For more information, go here.