Fusion-io strikes new OEM partnerships for hyperscale servers
The buzz around Facebook’s Open Compute Project (OCP) is growing as more organizations, particularly large enterprises, move to hyperscale as part of the industry-wide push for cost-effectiveness in storing and processing vast amounts of unstructured data. The architecture, pioneered by the social media giant and other web-scale companies such as Google and Amazon, is characterized by density, energy efficiency and high-performance, a combination Fusion-io is promising to deliver with its ioScale product.
First introduced at Facebook’s open compute conference in July 2013, the low-power MLC SSD is designed specifically for use in cloud data centers and provides up to 3.2 terabytes of flash memory per PCIe slot. Fast forward to this week’s OCP Summit where Fusion-io announced two new OEM deals to offer the card with hyperscale servers.
Under the first agreement, ioScale is being baked into Quanta’s Rackgo X line of rack solutions, which had already featured integration with Fusion-io’s ioMemory architecture. The product family is joined by updated OCP 1500 series systems from Hyve, a division of IT equipment distributor SYNNEX dedicated to developing solutions based on Facebook’s 2012 server specifications. The firm intends to certify the design at the Open Compute Certification and Solution Laboratory at the University of Texas, one of two new such facilities announced on Tuesday by OCP chair Frank Frankovsky. The other is located at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan.
While hardware is certainly a central focus, it is only one piece of the hyperscale puzzle. As Wikibon co-founder David Floyer explained during theCUBE’s opening session at OCP Summit, the real value comes from standards-based software abstraction.
“By pulling together hardware, software and applications into SMEs [single manageable entities], you manage the cost,” Floyer detailed. “By having those standards, you can then go on up the stack and add on middleware, databases and applications to reach economies of scale by having single SMEs as high up the stack as you can. This drives innovation in multiple ways.”
To hear the full analysis, check out the video below.
Image source Fusion-io
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