Fusion IO, of Salt Lake City has raised $48M in venture financing to develop next generation, Flash memory based “solid state server drive” io subsystems.
As a Fusion IO co-founder explains in this interview on the opening day of N+I Las Vegas (in Startup City), hard disk drive technology has not kept up with “Moore’s Law” which has defined the pace of innovation in semiconductors, especially memory, dsp, and processors for 40 years. Today it takes roughly 500 hard disk drives to keep up with a state of the art “quad quad” (16) core Pentium-based server. But fusion-io’s flash (semiconductor) based memory systems can keep up with the same server processor array, because it has no moving parts.
In this spectacular demo, a single FusionIO memory array delivers 1,000 HD video streams (about 4Mbps each) onto a “video wall”. The wall consists of sixteen 40″ LCD’s, each displaying 1000/16 = 62 separate HD video streams. With this setup, you could watch ALL of the Comcast channels (and then some) — at the same time!
Also of note, this is the startup company that recently hired Steve Wozniak as their Chief Scientist. I read about it a couple of months ago in the San Jose Mercury News, so will post a link to that article shortly.
Below is the third video segment of this 15-minute interview. I will have quite a bit more detail about this company within two weeks, as StartupTrek is planning on visiting their headquarters in Salt Lake City.
