Enterprise Organizations Continue Transition to Server-Attached Flash in the Data Center, Maximizing CPU Utilization While Reducing Operating Costs
Fusion-io, pioneer of ioMemory, a new flash-based, server-attached, storage-class memory, announced today that in the past 12 months it has shipped more than 15 petabytes of its enterprise flash, which is enough storage-class memory to hold more than 199 years’ worth of continuously played HD video or 15,360 times the entire print contents of the Library of Congress. The milestone showcases the growing global shift toward utilizing Fusion’s server-attached flash in data centers for enterprise applications, database acceleration, virtualization and cloud computing environments.
“Traditional server-storage architectures are being challenged in light of the cost-optimized performance of a server-attached approach to NAND flash deployment in the enterprise,” said Benjamin Woo, Program Vice President of Worldwide Storage Systems Research for IDC. “With 15 petabytes of Fusion’s server-deployed ioMemory technology shipped in just the last 12 months, it is increasingly clear that server-side flash has moved past the bleeding edge and is making its way into the mainstream of enterprise computing.”
“With a hundred times the capacity density of DRAM and less expensive on a per gigabyte basis, NAND Flash stands to solve the fundamental data supply problem that has led to 20 percent or lower average processor utilization, even in the face of virtualization,” said David Flynn, CEO of Fusion-io. “By integrating flash directly into servers using memory controller methodologies and virtual memory management techniques, ioMemory and the Fusion-io Virtual Storage Layer (VSL) make it possible for even large data sets to be housed effectively in memory. As applications can then utilize the full processing potential of the server, workloads can often be increased by 500 percent or more.”
ioMemory Efficiency Fuels Exponential Savings in Dollars and Energy
The data center efficiency improvement achieved with ioMemory technology reduces server scale-out and software licensing costs to such a degree that deploying ioMemory frequently produces immediate net savings. These savings are not only tied to ongoing operational cost reductions from requiring less floor space, power and cooling. Other benefits include more workloads per server, which means fewer software licenses and increased overall efficiency, making server-attached ioMemory an ideal solution for architects working within today’s tight budgets to reduce environmental impact while also gaining performance.
By contrast, NAND flash made to imitate disk drives in the form of solid-state disks (SSDs) and placed into legacy storage infrastructure constrains the rate at which servers can access data. This squanders much of the efficiency improvement potential of flash and saddles it with the increased expense of high-cost, proprietary storage systems. As a result, this approach to deploying flash is limited to smaller market segments where performance demands can justify the higher total cost of ownership.
More than 2,000 end users have chosen to architect their enterprise infrastructure upgrades with Fusion’s ioMemory technology, including more than half of the Fortune 50. Financial powerhouses such as Credit Suisse, cutting-edge entertainment providers such as Prime Focus, many of the world’s largest web monsters and others have recognized Fusion’s ability to dramatically improve their organizations’ ability to quickly and reliably access mission-critical data.