Fusion-io Launches ‘Atomic Series’ Of Flash Acceleration Cards

US flash storage expert Fusion-io has introduced the next generation of its PCI-E application acceleration cards under the name ‘Atomic Series’.

The PX600 and SX300 cards double the usable NAND capacity over the previous generation hardware, while keeping the same small footprint.

“Customers demand solutions that can offer breakthrough performance to their business applications, deliver the right information to the right users at the right time. The Atomic Series builds on the company’s long-standing track record of delivering application performance, and takes it to a truly new level,” said Gary Smerdon, Chief Strategy Officer at Fusion-io during a launch event in San Francisco. “It can do things that were not possible in a world architected for disk drives.”

‘At the speed of Now’

Fusion-io flash products fit into third-party servers and appliances to drastically improve performance, while not taking nearly as much space as a rack of SSDs. The company has around 7,000 customers, ranging from SMBs to the operators of the world’s largest data centres. These include financial institutions like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, which use application accelerators to reduce latency for their high-frequency trading operations.

Smeardon said that these early successes are just the beginning, putting the size of addressable market for the public company at $21 billion.

“Fusion-io saw the world’s appetite for all kinds of data, and we understood that time is the most precious asset that we have. We focused on innovating at the nexus of data and time, so that we could all live at the speed of now,” said CEO Shane Robinson while speaking at the event.

The Atomic Series is the pinnacle of research and development done by Fusion-io. It is based on consumer-grade MLC flash, made more reliable by the proprietary Fusion-io software.

The SX300 has been optimised for read-intensive workloads and offers up to 6,400GB of flash on a single card. It can read 2.6GB of data per second and write up to 1.2GB per second.

Meanwhile, the PX600 has been optimised for mixed workloads with a maximum capacity of 5,200GB. It can read 2.7GB per second and write up to 2.2GB per second in the optional high power mode. Being more expensive than SX300, it is also capable of running around 30 percent more IOPS.

True to the ‘speed of now’ tagline, both cards offer read access latency of 92 microseconds and write access latency of just 15 microseconds

The cards are available immediately from Fusion-io channel partners and major OEMs with which the company has been cooperating for years, including Dell, IBM, HP and Lenovo.

“Our partnerships give us a unique perspective to comprehend today’s needs, and predict the demands of applications tomorrow,” said Lance Smith, president and COO of Fusion-io, at the event. “Our understanding of persistent memory technologies like flash gives us a one-of-a-kind vision on filling the performance gap that exists in today’s data centres.”

What do you know about Flash memory? Take our quiz!