ComputerWorld has an article about Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, and he is excited about the energy savings in the data center.
Also, I've been close to a lot of people who worked in data centers - good friends -- and it's just like data centers always have huge racks and racks of equipment. And, almost every entity in the world is basing its operations on servers and disk storage, so it's almost unlimited. So [with Fusion-io] you're not confined to one little niche.
Now you may think what does Woz know about storage? Being ex-Apple I knew this part.
You've never really been a storage guy. What attracted you to this technology? Well, I was a storage guy really early - in floppy disks. I don't come from the heavy-duty storage area where you've got RAID arrays and fiber optic channels. But, actually, the way I approached even designing my floppy disk structures was to take out a lot of middle man technology that wasn't needed - to look at the overall problem and get from the start to the finish in one quick jump. And, I saw those same principles had been applied in designing [Fusion-io's] product.
The solution is not a SSD, but a PCIe card.
Computerworld - Earlier this year, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniakaccepted the position of chief scientist at start-up solid state drive company Fusion-io. It's the first time since 1972, when he worked in Hewlett-Packard Co's calculator division, that he's held a technologist's position for a company that wasn't his own.
Unlike many other solid state vendors, Fusion-io doesn't manufacture a NAND flash drive product in a 2.5-in. or 3.5-in hard drive form factor. The company makes PCIe cards with up to 640GB of capacity and 1.6GB/sec. throughput that can be inserted directly into servers, greatly increasing performance for I/O-intensive applications while also shrinking space requirements when compared to high-end hard disk drives.
Fusion-iO has a press release regarding their deployment at MySpace data center.
MySpace Uses Fusion-Powered I/O to Drive Greener Datacenters
Technology from Fusion-io Enables MySpace to Significantly Reduce Carbon Footprint, Saving Power, Cooling and Maintenance Costs
SALT LAKE CITY and LOS ANGELES – October 13, 2009 – Fusion-io today announced that it is working closely with MySpace to dramatically reduce the carbon footprint and costs associated with MySpace's datacenter operations. Using innovative solid-state storage solutions from Fusion-io, MySpace successfully deployed Fusion-io's technology to optimize their capital equipment and reduce the floor space and power consumed by their datacenter operations – significantly minimizing MySpace's environmental impact.
The revolutionary new deployment by MySpace offers another example of how solid-state storage technologies from Fusion-io give today's brightest engineering teams the power to rethink their datacenters and achieve dramatically lowered capital and operational costs by optimizing existing infrastructure for increased ease of management while greening the datacenter.
The case study PDF has more details.
The Results
Implementing Fusion-io gave MySpace the following benefits:
• Provided much higher performance, improving the user experience
• Cut hardware needs by 60%
• Significantly reduced its carbon footprint by lowering power and cooling requirements
• Recovered 280U of rack space
• Improved its data center’s reliability with non-volatile, 11-bit error correcting memory, and elimination of 2300 failure points
• Paid a much lower upfront price than for competitive solutions
Shawn plans to replace all of the remaining 1770 2U servers with Fusion-io enabled servers as they reach their end-of-life. This will allow MySpace to recover at least 1770U of rack space in the future, eliminate at least 18,000 failure points in their system, and save millions of dollars in power and cooling costs, showing
the world that you can make the smart business buy a green one too.