Type | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Industry | Solid-state drive |
Founded | 2005 |
Defunct | July 2014 (acquired by SanDisk) |
Headquarters | San Jose, California, , U.S. |
Key people | Shane Robison [1] (President and CEO) Steve Wozniak (Chief Scientist) |
Products | Hardware
Software
|
Parent | SanDisk Corporation (Western Digital) |
Fusion-io, Inc. was a computer hardware and software systems company (acquired by SanDisk Corporation in 2014) based in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, that designed and manufactured products using flash memory technology. The Fusion ioMemory was marketed for applications such as databases, virtualization, cloud computing, big data. [2] Their ioDrive product was considered around 2011 to be one of the fastest storage devices on the market. [3]
The company was founded in December 2005 as Canvas Technologies in Nevada. Co-founders were David Flynn and Rick White. The company was based in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, near Salt Lake City. In June 2006, the company name was changed to Fusion Multisystems, Incorporated. [4] [5] A product with the brand name ioDrive was demonstrated and announced in September 2007. [6]
In March 2008, Fusion-io raised $19 million in a series A round of funding from a group of investors led by New Enterprise Associates. [7] David Flynn was chief technology officer, while Don Basile was chief executive officer at the time. [7] Michael Dell invested in Fusion-io during this round. [8] It was chosen as an "innovation up-and-comer" in an online Business Week poll by early 2009. [8]
In 2009 and 2010, David Bradford, served as CEO. In February 2009, Fusion-io hired Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak as chief scientist. [9] It was chosen by Red Herring magazine as a "top 100" company in February 2009. [10] In March 2009, Fusion-io started working with HP on the IO Accelerator, a new high-performance solid-state drive. [11]
Fusion-io announced $47.5 million in a series B round of investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in April 2009. [12] [13] Hardware partner Samsung later invested in Fusion-io in October 2009. [14]
A third round of funding led by Meritech Capital Partners, with additional capital from Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, provided a total of $45 million in April 2010. [15] It was named the second most promising information technology company by The Wall Street Journal in March 2010. [16] In May 2010, the Linux block-io principal developer, Jens Axboe, joined Fusion-io after leaving Oracle. [17]
Fusion-io first filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in March 2011, with shares to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange with symbol FIO. [5] At the time, Facebook accounted for most of its revenues. In June 2011, Fusion-io announced it increased the price of its IPO to put the company's total value at $1.4 billion. The company had previously priced its shares to value the company at about $1.17 billion. [18] The shares were offered on June 9, raising the valuation to about $2 billion. [19]
On August 5, 2011, Fusion-io acquired IO Turbine for about $95 million. [20] IO Turbine's main product was the ioTurbine hybrid array (caching to flash) software, which is virtualization-aware, particularly of VMware environments. [21] [22]
In January 2012, Fusion-io achieved a record breaking billion IOPS from eight servers at the DEMO Enterprise event in San Francisco.[ citation needed ]
In June 2012, the Btrfs principal developers Chris Mason joined Fusion-io after leaving Oracle, [23] and Josef Bacik left Red Hat to join Fusion-io. [24]
In August 2012, Fusion-io announced the ION Data Accelerator software. [25] Since February 2014, the ION product is offered as an appliance instead of a software product. [26]
In March 2013, Fusion-io acquired the Linux software defined storage firm ID7, developers of the SCST generic SCSI target layer. [27] [28]
At Storage Field Day 3, Fusion-io announced their acquisition of NexGen Storage in April 2013 for $114 million cash and $5 million in stock. [29] [30] NexGen was located in Louisville, Colorado and had a product it called n5, which it announced in November 2011 and upgraded in July 2012. [31] [32] [33] The n5 was a hybrid product including hard disk drives as well as flash memory, aiming to provide more consistent performance guarantees than only disks. [34] The n5 was renamed ioControl hybrid storage after acquisition. [35]
In May 2013, the co-founders David Flynn (CEO) and Rick White (CMO) left. In October 2013, Dennis Wolff, its CFO, left. [36] [37] In November 2013, the Btrfs developers Chris Mason and Josef Bacik left Fusion-io for Facebook. [38] [39] [40]
In 2012 and 2013, Fusion-io was criticized for depending too heavily on two major customers—Facebook and Apple. [41] [42] [43] However, during the F2Q 2014 earnings call, it was made clear that in Q2 the orders of twelve customers exceeded $1 million each. [44]
A scalable multi-queue block layer for the Linux kernel was developed by Fusion-io engineers Axboe and Shaohua Li, and merged into the Linux kernel mainline in kernel version 3.13, released on January 19, 2014. This new block layer uses parallelism (and thus provides much higher performance) offered by SSDs using NVM Express. With the release of Linux kernel version 3.13, only the virtioblk driver has been modified to actually use this new interface. A technical presentation paper of this new feature was published at ACM SYSTOR'13. [45] [46] [47]
During the first half of 2014, Fusion-io sponsored conversion of the Linux kernel SCSI core to the blk-mq approach. [48]
In January 2014, Jens Axboe announced he was leaving Fusion-io to join Facebook. [49]
In June 2014, SanDisk announced its intentions to buy Fusion-io. [50] SanDisk completed its acquisition of Fusion-io in July 2014. [51]
Fusion-io called their architecture ioMemory. [6] It was announced at the DEMO conference in 2007, and software called ioSAN was shown in 2008. [52]
In March 2009, Hewlett-Packard announced the HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator adaptation of Fusion-io technology specifically for HP BladeSystem C-Series servers. [53] [54] IBM’s project Quicksilver, [55] based on Fusion-io technology, showed that solid-state technology in 2008 could deliver 1 million IOPS. [56] By September 2009, IBM offered a PCIe adapter, based on the ioDrive, for IBM servers. [57] In December 2009, IBM announced it would license the technology for an appliance. [58] [8]
Western Digital Corporation is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, including data storage devices, data center systems and cloud storage services.
SanDisk is a brand for flash memory products, including memory cards and readers, USB flash drives, solid-state drives, and digital audio players, manufactured and marketed by Western Digital. The original company, SanDisk Corporation was acquired by Western Digital in 2016.
Input/output operations per second is an input/output performance measurement used to characterize computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN). Like benchmarks, IOPS numbers published by storage device manufacturers do not directly relate to real-world application performance.
In computing, a hybrid drive is a logical or physical storage device that combines a faster storage medium such as solid-state drive (SSD) with a higher-capacity hard disk drive (HDD). The intent is adding some of the speed of SSDs to the cost-effective storage capacity of traditional HDDs. The purpose of the SSD in a hybrid drive is to act as a cache for the data stored on the HDD, improving the overall performance by keeping copies of the most frequently used data on the faster SSD drive.
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is also sometimes called a semiconductor storage device, a solid-state device or a solid-state disk, even though SSDs lack the physical spinning disks and movable read–write heads used in hard disk drives (HDDs) and floppy disks. SSD also has rich internal parallelism for data processing.
Jens Axboe is a Linux kernel hacker.
A trim command allows an operating system to inform a solid-state drive (SSD) which blocks of data are no longer considered to be 'in use' and therefore can be erased internally.
A hybrid array is a form of hierarchical storage management that combines hard disk drives (HDDs) with solid-state drives (SSDs) for I/O speed improvements.
Texas Memory Systems, Inc. (TMS) was an American corporation that designed and manufactured solid-state disks (SSDs) and digital signal processors (DSPs). TMS was founded in 1978 and that same year introduced their first solid-state drive, followed by their first digital signal processor. In 2000 they introduced the RamSan line of SSDs. Based in Houston, Texas, they supply these two product categories to large enterprise and government organizations.
NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via the PCI Express bus. The initialism NVM stands for non-volatile memory, which is often NAND flash memory that comes in several physical form factors, including solid-state drives (SSDs), PCIe add-in cards, and M.2 cards, the successor to mSATA cards. NVM Express, as a logical-device interface, has been designed to capitalize on the low latency and internal parallelism of solid-state storage devices.
In computing, Linux-IO (LIO) Target is an open-source implementation of the SCSI target that has become the standard one included in the Linux kernel. Internally, LIO does not initiate sessions, but instead provides one or more Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs), waits for SCSI commands from a SCSI initiator, and performs required input/output data transfers. LIO supports common storage fabrics, including FCoE, Fibre Channel, IEEE 1394, iSCSI, iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER), SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) and USB. It is included in most Linux distributions; native support for LIO in QEMU/KVM, libvirt, and OpenStack makes LIO also a storage option for cloud deployments.
The IBM XIV Storage System was a line of cabinet-size disk storage servers. The system is a collection of modules, each of which is an independent computer with its own memory, interconnections, disk drives, and other subcomponents, laid out in a grid and connected together in parallel using either InfiniBand or Ethernet connections. Each module has an x86 CPU and runs a software platform consisting largely of a modified Linux kernel and other open source software.
SCST is a GPL licensed SCSI target software stack. The design goals of this software stack are high performance, high reliability, strict conformance to existing SCSI standards, being easy to extend and easy to use. SCST does not only support multiple SCSI protocols but also supports multiple local storage interfaces and also storage drivers implemented in user-space via the scst_user driver.
Flashcache is a disk cache component for the Linux kernel, initially developed by Facebook since April 2010, and released as open source in 2011. Since January 2013, there is a fork of Flashcache, named EnhanceIO and developed by sTec, Inc. Since 2015 that fork became unmaintained and it was forked again and maintained by individuals.
bcache is a cache in the Linux kernel's block layer, which is used for accessing secondary storage devices. It allows one or more fast storage devices, such as flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), to act as a cache for one or more slower storage devices, such as hard disk drives (HDDs); this effectively creates hybrid volumes and provides performance improvements.
dm-cache is a component of the Linux kernel's device mapper, which is a framework for mapping block devices onto higher-level virtual block devices. It allows one or more fast storage devices, such as flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), to act as a cache for one or more slower storage devices such as hard disk drives (HDDs); this effectively creates hybrid volumes and provides secondary storage performance improvements.
EnhanceIO is a disk cache module for the Linux kernel. Its goal is to use fast but relatively small SSD drives to improve the performance of large but slow hard drives.
Enterprise Storage OS, also known as ESOS, is a Linux distribution that serves as a block-level storage server in a storage area network (SAN). ESOS is composed of open-source software projects that are required for a Linux distribution and several proprietary build and install time options. The SCST project is the core component of ESOS; it provides the back-end storage functionality.
An open-channel solid state drive is a solid-state drive which does not have a firmware Flash Translation Layer implemented on the device, but instead leaves the management of the physical solid-state storage to the computer's operating system. The Linux 4.4 kernel is an example of an operating system kernel that supports open-channel SSDs which follow the NVM Express specification. The interface used by the operating system to access open-channel solid state drives is called LightNVM.