Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Fusion-io Claims Flash Storage Advance

Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io, the solid state storage provider that is backed by a hefty $47.5M in venture capital from Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Dell Ventures, and Sumitomo Ventures, said Tuesday that the firm has created new technology that it claims can deliver much lower cost-per-gigabyte solid state storage. According to the firm, it has developed a new engineering technique for managing multi-level cell (MLC) flash technology, which can be used to deliver products which perform as well as the single-level cell technology currently used in solid state disk drives. MLC technology allows more bits per cell to be stored in flash memory, but has typically had lower reliability and higher bit error rates. Fusion-io said its technology, which it is billing single-mode level cell (SMLC) will have comparable endurance and write performance levels as SLC products. The firm said it will tap that technology for new products available this quarter, in the 160GB and 320GB modules of its ioDrive and ioDrive Duo. Exact savings per gigabyte, and new pricing on the solid state memory was not disclosed.