The concept of the RAM disk has been around for a while but due to expense and limitations are virtually unheard of in practical use. FusionIo, with its revolutionary ioMemory technology, intends to change all this and bridge the gap of limitations between current storage and memory technologies with the innovative new ioDrive.

The ioDrive, with a catch phrase “The power of a SAN in the palm of your hand”, operates on the PCI-Express x4 bus with access rates approaching DRAM with a sustained 600 and 800 MBytes/s write and read operations respectively. Aside from the high speed, small packet transfer feature of the drive, ioDrives require no RAID controller to provide redundancy between drives, there are no moving parts and they use industry standard form factor and interface.

The advantages to servers are a magnitude of significance, boasting an increase of servability of 10X more content for webservers and webservices, an increase of 25X data transfer and acquisition for data warehousing and an acceleration of downloading, saving and streaming at a whopping 100X.

The 640GB version is priced at $19,000 with several other capacity variations. If the current rate of $30/Gb is maintained an 80GB ioDrive would still be luxury at $2400 but much more attainable. Release is set for Q1 2008.

ioDrive