Fusion-io’s new ioXtreme brings the speed

Bobby Miller August 5, 2009 5:16 PM ET in Tech

Fusion-io, makers of really really fast SSDs, announced a new line of workstation storage cards, the ioXtreme. Marketed primarily towards workstations used in film and television production, as well as high-end gaming rigs, the ioXtreme has an 80 gigabyte capacity and screaming fast transfer speeds averaging around 520 MB/second.

Icrontic spoke with David Flynn, Chief Technology Officer at Fusion-io. David was very excited about the ioXtreme and quite confident of its performance. This was made evident by his passion for his work, as well as Fusion-io’s presentation on the show floor at their booth. In fact, I would suggest that Fusion-io has one of the most impressive booth setups at SIGGRAPH this year. There is a wall of LCD displays, and across this wall is a composite of 1,200 different DVD quality video feeds, all playing at the same time via a single ioXtreme card. The video is completely smooth, with not a single hiccup to be found.

That's 1,200 DVD quality videos streaming at once

David stressed that the ioXtreme is not to be considered much of a storage drive, but rather a high speed method for moving data on a computer. He says the speed of the ioXtreme allows unprecedented response. For instance, it allows compositors to work on HD video feeds in real time.

David explained to us that we are in a new world order of multiple core processors. We buy more cores rather than faster processors. As a result, I/O required an overhaul. Standard hard drives become a bottle neck. Disk drives are great at mass storage, but slow to move large sets of data. The ioXtreme’s strongest suit is pushing data quickly and reliably. The two types of storage devices working together creates an ideal setup that pushes information at blazing speeds.

The ioXtreme will retail at the manageable price of $895, besting most single level cell SSDs on the market today. Its release will be soon, and prospective buyers can join a mailing list on their site to be notified of when the card becomes available.

13 Comments:

1. Cyclonite

   Castle Crashin'!

   
   5 Aug '09, 5:25 pm

   I got to see one of those walls setup earlier this year at Storage Networking World. It was freakin' awesome.
2. Komete

   DIY Haxx0r

   
   5 Aug '09, 7:16 pm

   $895 for this kind of performance is really encouraging. I know I'm probably being too optimistic but seems like this could be mainstream in 4 or 5 years time.
3. Bobby Miller

   The Dean of Computer Graphics

   
   6 Aug '09, 10:07 am

   Quoting Komete

   $895 for this kind of performance is really encouraging. I know I'm probably being too optimistic but seems like this could be mainstream in 4 or 5 years time.

   We'll probably see mainstream implementation of tech like this well before 4 or 5 years. $895 feels steep, but if you consider what that card is capable of, and what it'd doing for you if you're a gamer or CG artist, then that price point is very close to being just right. It'll come around sooner than later.
4. Daniel

   Guest

   
   6 Aug '09, 10:36 am

   How many "DVD quality" videos can a regular hard drive stream?
5. CannonFodder

   Icrontic Convert

   
   6 Aug '09, 11:08 am

   If you installed windows and your top end games on that drive... Not much space left over...
6. Thrax

   Cad

   
   6 Aug '09, 11:09 am

   Quoting Daniel

   How many "DVD quality" videos can a regular hard drive stream?

   Somewhere between 9-20, depending on the drive.
7. Cliff_Forster

   Keepin it real

   
   6 Aug '09, 12:56 pm

   I bet it wont be long until we see some kind of combination unit in a 3.5" form factor. An SSD combined to work in tandem with a hard drive. That could have real potential to speed up your large data transfers while keeping the core of your OS everyday applications on SSD, while dedicating your hard drive for your photo and music collection. You can do that now across a couple of drives, but combining the tech into one unit could make it more palatable to OEM's and mainstream users ultimately making it more affordable.

   Long term we all want speedy SSD's that support the massive storage requirements we have, that is obviously some years away, but if you could combine an SSD for speed for large transfers and quick booting the OS, and have the spindle drive there for your storage requirements, it may get us an affordable performance upgrade sooner than we thought.
8. Thrax

   Cad

   
   6 Aug '09, 1:02 pm

   We were supposed to have those devices. They were called Hybrid Hard Drives. They were supposed to be everywhere on the notebook: A mechanical drive backed by several gigs of NAND. Windows Vista was built specifically for them...

   Yeah, that never happened.
9. Cliff_Forster

   Keepin it real

   
   6 Aug '09, 1:41 pm

   Looking around on Newegg, looks like some 2.5" high speed 64 GB SSD's are hovering around $180 now. Its getting a little better all the time. For guys like us, we can just set up two drives and get the hybrid effect today. $180 might be getting into a range where I can almost justify doing it.

   For Joe consumer and the OEM's though, someone will need that hybrid drive. Its probably the next logical step for this tech, and I think that is what Fusion-io is hinting at. We got the fastest SSD on earth, but for today, its not a hard drive replacement, its a hard drive enhancement. (one hell of an enhancement at that)

   If they start marketing that way, and getting consumers to accept the fact that they are not going to meet their computers entire storage demand with SSD I think the market may be more receptive to them and start buying them to enhance their performance without expecting it to replace their spindle drive just yet.

   So for now, that may be the way to go to market, SSD, its a system performance enhancement, not a replacement storage unit. In four or five years, perhaps we will get to a point where we can all afford blazing fast terabyte SSD's, but if you want to taste the performance now, its getting to a point where you might be able to justify it as an early adopter. Maybe not these $900 Fusion-io offerings that are obviously aimed at professional workstations, but it is getting there.
10. Thrax

    Cad

    
    6 Aug '09, 1:48 pm

    HHDs are dead. They will never exist. The next logical step is to get SSDs down into a reasonable $/GB range and phase out mechanical disks.

    Storage occurs in ~30 year cycles. We've been using the mechanical disk since the 70s. NAND has only been around since 1988 or 1989, which means it has a good 10 years to mature before we even come close to the point hard drives are at.
11. Cliff_Forster

    Keepin it real

    
    6 Aug '09, 2:19 pm

    But there are companies like Fusion-io that want to sell SSD's today, and that means marketing as a performance enhancement and not a storage replacement. SSD is going to be less about storing your data, and more about how it enhances how your data moves from A to B.

    Think about this too, if your a company like Western Digital or Seagate, and your schlepping spindle drives in a competitive market for razor thin margin's, and there really isn't much that you can do to advance that tech and demand a reasonable profit, it is what it is, its as good as its going to get. Those companies are probably dying for an opportunity to advance their technology for the next round, and with NAND becoming more affordable, it may provide an opportunity for them to re visit the hybrid drive as a viable option for consumers in the mid term, while SSD becomes a more viable storage replacement, which is at least some years away.

    Also, if your the other hardware vendors, the Intel's and AMD's of the world, you have to be hoping that it will get adopted to remove the bottleneck that is already slowing your architecture, and its gotta get bad enough at some point where its going to hamper their development and ultimately their ability to justify new product at a premium.

    The only way I see OEM's and consumers eating up NAND over the next year or two is if its marketed in a tidy neat little package with a spindle drive. I would not say hybrid drives are dead, they were just before their time, I will go so far as to predict we see a few in OEM machines alongside the windows 7 release in Oct.
12. Bobby Miller

    The Dean of Computer Graphics

    
    7 Aug '09, 2:21 pm

    One of the things David stressed was that at the moment, SSDs aren't completely reliable. They have a rapid failure rate of about 1 in 1,000, and each one of those cards have per chip two stacks of arrays of four equalling up to something like a hundred or so chips. I think.

    My numbers are probably fudged, I've been partying all week, leave me alone.

    You get the idea. So the chance that one of those chips are bad is relatively high right now. Now, the ioXtreme is built with two redundancy chips to prevent data loss at the failure of a chip (and even implements a self-heal technique).

    The point is, high capacity NAND requires a lot of chips, which results in a riskier failure rate. Though not typically catastrophic, it is still a nuinsence. For massive storage amounts, the HDD is still a far better choice. Until NAND matures and becomes more reliable, we probably won't see too many massive storage options.

    ...I'm exhausted.
13. Komete

    DIY Haxx0r

    
    7 Aug '09, 7:30 pm

    Quoting UPSLynx

    We'll probably see mainstream implementation of tech like this well before 4 or 5 years. $895 feels steep, but if you consider what that card is capable of, and what it'd doing for you if you're a gamer or CG artist, then that price point is very close to being just right. It'll come around sooner than later.

    I won't lie, @ $895 my interest is perked. There is a CAM program that I use and I'm wondering if a faster drive could make it generate complex tool paths faster. It's a CPU intensive task for sure, but I don't know if a faster hard drive makes a difference. If it does and it could significantly reduced times, then this could be something I would give a serious look at.

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