Fusion-io SSD Setup Screams Along at 1 TB/sec

We think that today's top of the line SSDs are very fast relative to what we're accustomed to using from years with magnetic storage. But if for some reason that's still not fast enough for you, there's Fusion-io's SSD technology that's able to reach a blistering 1 TB per second transfer rate.

Such bandwidth was achieved using Fusion-io's development of the ioDrive Octal, which is a PCI-Express card that holds eight ioMemory Modules -- putting the equivalent capacity and performance of eight ioDrives into a single card. By combining the performance of 220 of these ioDrive Octal cards into a six-rack system, the set up is capable of sustaining over 1 TB of aggregate bandwidth with access latencies under 50 microseconds.

To put that into perspective with today's most common storage technology, achieving a 1 TB/sec. sustained bandwidth would otherwise require close to 55,440 disk drives, 396 SAN controllers, 792 I/O servers and 132 racks of equipment.

"We were eager to take on the challenge of creating a device that meets the intense demands of high performance computing. With this architecture, IOPS are easy. We achieved over a hundred million (100,000,000) IOPS, more than enough performance to meet our customer's requirements. The real power in our architecture was the ability to also scale bandwidth," said Steve Wozniak, chief scientist at Fusion-io. "We look forward to productizing the ioDrive Octal in the future, and bringing the power of this solid-state storage technology from the world of HPC to the enterprise."

A single ioDrive Octal, which itself is a considerable speed demon, is capable of 800,000 IOPS (4k packet size), 6 GB/s bandwidth, 5 TB maximum capacity and comes in a x16 gen-2 double-wide PCI Express form factor.

As for pricing, if you have to ask…