Fusion-io Atomic Series to accelerate applications for enterprises

Fusion-io has rolled out the Atomic Series, a flash memory platform featuring what the company says is double the capacity on the smallest available NAND footprint for appliance and server environments. The family is targeted at companies of all sizes, from small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) to Fortune 500s and hyperscale* entities.

Whiting lists Fusion-io's partners.

“Patience is no longer a virtue in a world where we expect information at our fingertips with ever increasing velocity,” said Fusion-io CEO and Chairman of the Board Shane Robison. 

“Latency is the new dial up. Our newest advancements in flash memory with the release of Atomic Series ensure that data flows seamlessly and with greater speed, efficiency and reliability by accelerating data-driven applications.” 

Ian Whiting, EVP, Global Field Operations, Fusion-io, explained during a briefing in Singapore that customers are demanding the same latency they get from consumer applications in the enterprise world. A half-second of delay in serving pages on Facebook results in a loss of 3% in user traffic, he said. "This need for speed with no compromise is the difference between winners and losers,” he emphasised. "It's not about making storage faster, it's about How can I serve data to make decisions."

Atomic Series is built on third-generation Fusion-io memory-based architecture, delivering higher performance than typical solid state disks (SSDs) in a fraction of the space. This makes it ideal for a broad range of applications including database and cloud applications, big data analytics, and hyperscale workloads. 

Whiting noted that the prevailing perception is that SSDs are cheaper than flash. "It is much cheaper to deliver and manage data with PCI flash than SSDs. When you do a side by side comparison, is SSD is a lot cheaper but the capacity is lower and they use more real estate in the data centre. They also fail more often," he pointed out.

Source: Fusion-io.

“Speed is critical to most any application, whether it is a doctor’s immediate request for patient data, a retailer’s need for fraud detection or an individual’s desire to share and connect special moments,” said Jeff Janukowicz, Research Director at IDC. “To meet this need for speed, businesses require solutions that can accelerate the flow of information and this positions companies, such as Fusion-io, to capitalise on this growing demand."

Fusion-io has over 7,000 customers in more than 80 countries across the education, financial services, government, healthcare, media and entertainment, online services, retail and telecommunications sectors. The opportunity in the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region is huge, with the Singapore team alone growing from three to 25 people in six months, and approximately 30,000 units in the region to date, said Charlie Foo, VP, APJ, Fusion-io. Foo estimated that the addressable enterprise market, including large enterprises and SMEs at up to US$6.3 billion in APJ. 

Among the customers introduced by Foo were Korea's Kakao Talk, which saw a 30X improvement in performance density; Japan's Dwango video sharing platform, which reduced its server footprint by 75%, and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which slashed login times from 5 minutes to 30 seconds by using a Fusion-io implementation.

The company was recently acquired by Sandisk, which announced the expiration of an antitrust-related waiting period on July 16. Whiting noted that the acquisition is on track to close by the end of September, as Sandisk has reported. "It creates this end-to-end flash company that can leverage the full extent of the Sandisk organisation," he said.

*Hyperscale companies serve a global audience, such as Microsoft, TenCent with WeChat and Facebook.