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    NAND Flash Drive Maker Fusion-io Goes Public, Gets $1.8B Valuation

    By
    Chris Preimesberger
    -
    June 9, 2011
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      Fusion-io, one of the more innovative users of NAND flash for enterprise data centers, staged its initial public offering June 9 and did very well in its first day on the New York Stock Exchange.

      Fusion-io (NYSE: FIO), probably best known for hiring Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, originally had expected to price its shares at $13 to $15, which was later upped to $16 to $18. The stock eventually was priced at $19, and it closed at $22.50, a 24 percent increase, in one day. It was selling at slightly below that price in after-hours trading.

      Thanks partially to an endorsement from Facebook, which uses the company’s fast storage arrays in its data centers, Fusion-io ended up with a market value of about $1.8 billion on its first day as a public company.

      Fusion-io’s ioDrive is the first direct-attached, solid-state server storage array that uses PCI-Express, or PCIe, connectivity. The ioDrive is small-barely larger than a typical handheld device-that uses advanced NAND flash chip clustering to perform the same functions as a spinning disk storage array, only with much faster read/write performance and much less power draw.

      Most IT shops, if they use NAND flash, utilize it in purpose-built solid-state drives. Fusion-io’s angle is that its units plug into the same sockets as hard disk drives and are much faster.

      For example, the company claims ioDrive is capable of 120,000 random read/write IOPS-about 100 times faster than a typical Serial ATA drive.

      PCIe 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.

      Fusion-io has been busy creating other products during its five years in operation. Last year, the company came out with a new NAND flash-optimized OS subsystem called the ioMemory VSL (Virtual Storage Layer) for better utilization of NAND flash memory and storage arrays.

      Wozniak has served as a key technical adviser to the Fusion-io research and development group since February 2009.

      Chris Preimesberger
      https://www.eweek.com/author/cpreimesberger/
      Chris J. Preimesberger is Editor Emeritus of eWEEK. In his 16 years and more than 5,000 articles at eWEEK, he distinguished himself in reporting and analysis of the business use of new-gen IT in a variety of sectors, including cloud computing, data center systems, storage, edge systems, security and others. In February 2017 and September 2018, Chris was named among the 250 most influential business journalists in the world (https://richtopia.com/inspirational-people/top-250-business-journalists/) by Richtopia, a UK research firm that used analytics to compile the ranking. He has won several national and regional awards for his work, including a 2011 Folio Award for a profile (https://www.eweek.com/cloud/marc-benioff-trend-seer-and-business-socialist/) of Salesforce founder/CEO Marc Benioff--the only time he has entered the competition. Previously, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. He has been a stringer for the Associated Press since 1983 and resides in Silicon Valley.

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