San Diego (CA) – How would you like to hold the power of 4000 hard drives in your hand?  At the Demo fall conference in San Diego, Fusion IO announced a new flash-based card that can transfer at 1.5 GB/s.  The modular card has one-third of a terabyte worth of storage capacity and a simple add-on increases this to two-thirds of a terabyte.  

Furthermore, add a disk controller and this thing becomes a hybrid drive controller that can hook up to traditional high capacity hard drives.  The card even has an integrated network connection for 10 GigE or 40 Gb/s InfiniBand.

Fusion IO claims the IO-SAN card can turn any off-the-shelf server into a full-bore storage area network.  The card plugs into a PCI Express slot and has the flash memory right on the card.  Fusion IO claims the card can perform up to 200,000 IOPS.

You may remember Fusion IO from a previous story and video we did about them back at last year’s DEMO fall.  Then, David Flynn, Fusion’s CTO, told us that the cards were the equivalent to 1000 hard drives in the palm of your hand.  What a difference a year makes.