Fusion-io SSD Technology Breaks Into IBM Servers: Are Consumers Next?

If it's dealing with flash storage, NAND or any combination of the two, there's a chance Fusion-io is involved somewhere. The company responsible for serving up one of the fastest consumer SSDs we've ever seen is also making waves in the enterprise, as today is has announced the company’s core ioMemory technology will serve as the basis for a solid-state storage solution offered exclusively in IBM's family of System x servers. The news is pretty large for just a start-up company; it takes a lot of dough and a lot of support to really break through into a market dominated by huge players like Seagate and Western Digital, but tossing a partnership with IBM on your resume can definitely go a long way.

In keeping with the hot trends of the year, we're told that this new solution is "designed to address the storage needs of data-heavy applications such as those used in social media, ecommerce and financial services." The device at hand is the new IBM High IOPS Adapter, which will "help database, application and system administrators architect their data centers to meet performance goals that could not be realized with traditional, disk-based storage solutions."

What does this mean for the average user? Not a lot, but it shows that Fusion-io could be a real force in the coming years. If it can manage to slip into IBM server systems, what's stopping it from slipping its SSD technology into mainstream notebooks? Not much, we'd bet. And trust us when we say that we want more SSDs available in more laptops as soon as possible; once you've used one, it's tough to compute on the go with a sluggish HDD.

The IBM High IOPS Adapter supports enterprise customers’ reliability needs by offering Fusion’s Flashback protection, which features chip-level redundancy. The Adapter also gives customers advanced error correction and many other features that make the solid-state solution one of the most dependable in the industry.

“We are excited to collaborate with IBM and bring easily managed, server-deployed solid-state technology to more of the world’s system and database administrators,” said David Flynn, CTO and president of Fusion-io. “In addition to the data performance improvements and industry-leading reliability, IBM customers have the ability to significantly reduce capital equipment, floor space and power consumed by their data center operations, enabling innovation at all levels of the data center architecture."

The new IBM High IOPS Adapter can be purchased through IBM. To learn more, visit: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/ssd/ssd_adapters.html.