Palo Alto (CA) – Fusion IO, best known for its superfast solid state disks (SSDs), has been contracted by Hewlett-Packard (HP) to supply SSDs for the firm’s server division. The disks promises to be at least three times as fast in reading data and are capable of 100,000 IOPs. And yes, in case you ask, these disks are expensive and they may not be in the available budget for your desktop PC.
Fusion IO’s PCIe-based SSDs have been making headlines for some time, but the actual products appear not to have gained much visibility with customers yet. That may change very soon as the company has become an OEM contracted by HP to supply its technology in a Type 1 Mezzanine card for blade servers.
HP is already selling and shipping an 80 GB version for $4400 and said that it will be shipping a 160 GB card ($7700) and a 320 GB model ($13,200) by March 10. According to Fusion IO, the cards are capable of delivering a data throughput of 800 MB/s in reading and 600 MB/s in writing processes. Marketed as an IO accelerator, the cards also deliver up to 100,000 IOPs, which is, according to our knowledge, the highest performance currently available in this discipline. Latency time is estimated to be about 50 microseconds to access a 4K block of data.
HP said that the drives will last more than 15 years based on a 5 TB write-and-erase rate per day. The drives are supported by RHEL 4 and 5 operating systems as well as Windows Server x86-64 2003 and x86-64 2008. They cannot be used as boot drives at this time, HP noted.
