San Diego (CA) – Hard drives will be relegated to the pasture as flash drives take center-stage in the enterprise, according to flash card maker Fusion-io.  Today, at Demofall 08 in San Diego, company reps announced their upcoming ioSAN card which can hold up to two memory modules for up to 640 GB of flash memory storage.  Fusion-io claims its card can perform the work of thousands of hard drives and in so doing companies will rethink hard drives as archival storage or “the new tape”.  Company reps also hinted at an upcoming product at the E For All convention.

Fusion-io’s ioSAN card actually has three pieces.  The carrier portion plugs into your PCI Express slot and has connectors in the back for dual 10 gigabit Ethernet or for 40 gigabit per second Infiniband.  The two connectors on the top-left and right of the card can hook up to a memory module holding up to 320 GB of high-speed flash memory – this gives you up to 640 GB of capacity on a single card.  However, some users might opt to ditch the second memory module for a RAID module that can connect to both SATA drives and SAS (Serial attached SCSI) drives.    

Rick White, Fusion’s Chief Marketing Officer, and David Flynn, CTO, told TG Daily that the cards can transfer up to 1.5 GB/sec with up to 200,000 IOPS.  Such bandwidth and i/o power is equivalent to approximately 4000 regular hard drives and for enterprises this is a huge deal.  For home users, buying one or two hard drives gets you a lot of storage for just a few pennies per gigabyte, but for enterprises this is a different story.  “Hard drives don’t scale in performance, so companies spend all this money on racks of drives, cooling, cases and cabling,” said White.  All of that, White added, can be condensed down to one card.

But there’s an interesting twist to the enterprise environment once you start replacing all these hard drives.  White claims companies will reclaim the space once taken up by all the hard drive racks by popping in more computational servers.  He also said that companies could still maintain banks of hard drives for archival purposes adding, “I think hard disks will be the new tape.”

What about the safety of your data on the card?  What about all those stories about high failure rates of solid state drives.  Well, according to Flynn, there’s a “dirty little secret” in the flash business.  He told us that transistor gate sizes are getting so small that it’s very easy to short out a chip.  Fusion-io cards ship with some extra capacity just in case a chip shorts out.  In addition, there’s a “FlashBack” feature that allows you to literally rip a flash chip from the card while it’s running.

The memory module has an array of 24 flash chips and an extra parity chip (in our photos it’s the first chip on left-side the card) that are seen as separate drives.  You can think of the while card as RAID-5 card, except in this case it isn’t for hard drives, but for the chips on the card.  Flynn told us that you can de-solder a memory chip without losing data.  Like regular RAID though, you can only pull off one chip at a time … rip out two and you’re out of luck.  He added that future cards might be made with pressure sockets that allow you to release chips on the fly.

So what exactly can you do with all that bandwidth and IOPS?  Heavy enterprise databases, insane video editing and basically anything that requires moving a lot of data should work much better with the ioSAN card.  During his on stage demo, Flynn and White threw DVDs at each other and said you can transfer five DVDs worth of information in about fifteen seconds.   At other venues, Fusion-io has successfully played every episode from four seasons of the Stargate television series at the same time.  White told us company engineers converted the episodes to separate .VOB files and streamed them simultaneous through the card.  White added, “that didn’t even stress out the card.”

Ok so this sounds all well and good for enterprise customers, companies that spend millions of dollars on servers, hard drives and cooling, but what about the little guy …. like a gamer?  Flynn and White told us that Fusion-io will be exhibiting at the upcoming E for All gaming convention.  A beta version of a Windows driver and a “top secret” gaming product will be shown off.  They couldn’t tell me exactly what it was, but what else could it be?

White is an avid World of Warcraft player and we talked about playing multiple characters (aka multi-boxing) on a single computer.  Normally this is limited not by your processor speed, but by the hard drive as your computer tries to open up the same World of Warcraft folder multiple times.  Of course you could have multiple copies of the World of Warcraft folder on different hard drives, but that requires more cables, expense and cooling.  Wink wink, nudge nudge, White said the future product might allow you to run five or more instances of World of Warcraft from a single…  um … errr… gadget.

ioSAN cards will be available after the first of the year in 2009.  No pricing has been announced.

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