fusion-io: flash io-memory, flash results, flash growth

On November 16, we went on our third visit and we paid another visit to Fusion-io (see the account of our June visit to Fusion-io by clicking here). Fusion-io is the epitome of these successful technology companies as can be found almost only in the US and which make this kind of press trips so useful.

a stunning customer base

The company was founded in 2006 by David Flynn and Rick White. In 2007, it unveiled io-memory. In 2008, it launched its first products; but the market didn't quite understand it. In 2009, it then partnered with HP and IBM and Lightspeed and Samsung invested money in the company. In 2010, WSJ named Fusion-io the no.2 emerging technology company; it is 300 employee-big, based in Salt Lake City, Utah and most of its execs are based in Mountain View, Calif. Fusion-io is a disruptive company. In 2009, it grew by 5 1/2 times. Customers include large names, mostly in the financial markets, with 2 major Private Banks but also large Social Web players or a West coast online ads veteran website, as well as various retailers and manufacturing industry behemoths ...

the pain-points of data centre managers and Fusion-io's response

Jim Dawson, EVP worldwide sales at Fusion-io, explained to us the history of the disk drive and went into the details of the pain-points of clients and data centre managers. In 2007, one needs 25 disks to equate the performance of 1 CPU. In 1997, one needed 2 disks to do the same thing. Today, one needs 600 disks to equate the performance of a multicore processor.

This is the main pain-point: customers may not recognise this, but they will notice that 1 in 3 servers use less than 20% of their CPU potential and this is a big threat to datacentre productivity. The trend of SSDs was meant to turn flash and make it look like a disk, and the reason why we had this trend is that it was easy. Beyond that, Fusion-io has developed a new category, a hybrid of dRAM and storage which bridges the gap by providing the new form of storage called io-memory. But what does that mean to customers? Here are a few examples:

• answers.com: grew from 350 to 3,500 queries per second, replication time increased 31 times (from over 6 hours to a little more than 12 minutes),
• prime focus: improved data load support 20x in the same rack space,
• datalogix: query time reduced from 2 hours to 4 minutes,
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: improved their bandwidth from 176MB/s per server to 4.75GB/s that is to say a 26.9x improvement,
• Win.com improved their average SQL transaction time by taking down from 345 milliseconds to 88 milliseconds, i.e. a 4x improvement
• etc.

We are talking about improvements which are 10x or more and this is why this small company from Utah has grown into a 3 digit million $ company in just 3 years! and the end-client benefits are not just about performance, they are also about savings related to power and cooling.

So, why do OEMs like HP and IBM agree to work with Fusion-io even though io-memory is aimed at reducing the number of servers and disks which they sell? In fact, they agree to this because it's an inevitable change in the industry, that if they don't do it, someone else will and besides, the servers they sell tend to be a lot more upmarket too. this underlying trend in the market is shown in the following diagram (source: Denali & Garner, February 2010) and shows that PCIe cards, the technology invented by Fusion-io should amount to more than 1/3 of the total SSD market by 2012-2013. The trend was set by Fusion-io and will soon become mainstream.

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