Shortly after flash storage pioneer Fusion-io acquired IoTurbine the company debuted what it called ioCache, a flash-based RAM substitute that comes in handy in high-performance analytics environments, and require a lot of juice. Now, Fusion debuted yet another solution based on IoTurbine’s caching software that’s even more buzzworthy.

The Fusion ION acceleration platform turns the ioDrives that run inside customers’ servers into a single flash pool that can be accessed across the network, and packs a lot of value. This flash SAN reduces latency because data is stored on the server-side, and  at the same time allows for much more agile resource allocation a la cloud. To top it off ION can also save a lot in equipment costs (switches etc) because ioDrives running the software can fulfill the very same roles for a much lower price tag.

Fusion-io chief executive David Flynn talked a bit about the significance of the product launch:

“Software-defined solutions are rapidly replacing specialized hardware throughout the datacenter, and Fusion-io has been at the forefront of this transition since our founding,” Flynn said. “ION software combines customers’ preferred server platforms and ioMemory to deliver greater performance than even dedicated flash appliances, while also improving the efficiency of high performance storage arrays.”

ON can provide performance of 1,000,592 4K random IOs per sec with 6GBps of throughput and only 56 microseconds of lag time.  It can speed things up by up to 25 percent, and one unnamed media company realized a 40x increase in performance for certain applications.
Fusion-io’s engineering team has been working on a lot of fun projects lately. Last month the company debuted Extended Memory, a DRAM abstraction layer that handles data better and makes developers’ lives considerably easier.  Fusion-io also teamed up with NetApp for a very interesting and beneficial partnership.  Read our analysis here.