Fusion-io
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Fusion-io, Inc. was a
computer hardware Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the computer case, case, central processing unit (CPU), Random-access memory, random access memory (RAM), Computer monitor, monitor, Computer mouse, mouse, Computer keyboard, ...
and
software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
systems company (acquired by
SanDisk Corporation SanDisk is a brand for flash memory products, including memory cards and readers, USB flash drives, solid-state drives, and digital audio players, manufactured and marketed by Western Digital. The original company, SanDisk Corporation was acquire ...
in 2014) based in
Cottonwood Heights, Utah Cottonwood Heights is a city located in Salt Lake County, Utah, the United States, along the east bench of the Salt Lake Valley. It lies south of the cities of Holladay and Murray, east of Midvale, and north of Sandy within the Salt Lake City, ...
, that designed and manufactured products using
flash memory Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both us ...
technology. The Fusion was marketed for applications such as databases, virtualization, cloud computing, big data. Their product was considered around 2011 to be one of the fastest storage devices on the market.


History

The company was founded in December 2005 as Canvas Technologies in
Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. N ...
. Co-founders were David Flynn and Rick White. The company was based in
Cottonwood Heights, Utah Cottonwood Heights is a city located in Salt Lake County, Utah, the United States, along the east bench of the Salt Lake Valley. It lies south of the cities of Holladay and Murray, east of Midvale, and north of Sandy within the Salt Lake City, ...
, near
Salt Lake City Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the Capital (political), capital and List of cities and towns in Utah, most populous city of Utah, United States. It is the county seat, seat of Salt Lake County, Utah, Sal ...
. In June 2006, the company name was changed to Fusion Multisystems, Incorporated. A product with the brand name was demonstrated and announced in September 2007. In March 2008, Fusion-io raised $19 million in a
series A round A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...
of
funding Funding is the act of providing resources to finance a need, program, or project. While this is usually in the form of money, it can also take the form of effort or time from an organization or company. Generally, this word is used when a firm uses ...
from a group of investors led by
New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With ~$25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the w ...
. David Flynn was chief technology officer, while
Don Basile Don Basile is an entrepreneur and high tech investor best known for his work in the fields of technology, healthcare, and telecommunications. Don Basile currently serves as an investor in multiple companies He is a contributing author at Tech Crun ...
was chief executive officer at the time.
Michael Dell Michael Saul Dell (born February 23, 1965) is an American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies, one of the world's largest technology infrastructure companies. He is ranked the 2 ...
invested in Fusion-io during this round. It was chosen as an "innovation up-and-comer" in an online ''Business Week'' poll by early 2009. In 2009 and 2010, David Bradford, served as CEO. In February 2009, Fusion-io hired
Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...
co-founder
Steve Wozniak Stephen Gary Wozniak (; born August 11, 1950), also known by his nickname "Woz", is an American electronics engineer, computer programmer, philanthropist, inventor, and technology entrepreneur. In 1976, with business partner Steve Jobs, he c ...
as chief scientist. It was chosen by ''Red Herring'' magazine as a "top 100" company in February 2009. In March 2009, Fusion-io started working with HP on the
IO Accelerator The HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator is a type of solid-state drive in a mezzanine card form factor for HP's BladeSystem c-Class servers. This product was announced by HP on March 2, 2009. The follow-on product, the HP StorageWorks PCIe IO Accele ...
, a new high-performance
solid-state drive A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is ...
. Fusion-io announced $47.5 million in a series B round of investment led by
Lightspeed Venture Partners Lightspeed Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm focusing on multi-stage investments in the enterprise, consumer, and health sectors. Lightspeed invests in seed, early and growth-stage companies. The company invests in the U.S. and a ...
in April 2009. Hardware partner
Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...
later invested in Fusion-io in October 2009. A third round of funding led by
Meritech Capital Partners Meritech Capital Partners is an American Venture Firm company focused on late-stage venture capital investments in information technology companies with a focus on consumer Internet and media, software and services, enterprise infrastructure, an ...
, with additional capital from
Accel Partners Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is an American venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional ...
and
Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z, legal name AH Capital Management, LLC) is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Andreessen ...
, provided a total of $45 million in April 2010. It was named the second most promising information technology company by ''
The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'' in March 2010. In May 2010, the Linux block-io principal developer,
Jens Axboe Jens Axboe (born circa 1976) is a Linux kernel hacker. Work Axboe is the current Linux kernel maintainer of the block layer and other block devices, along with contributing the CFQ I/O scheduler, Noop scheduler, Deadline scheduler, io_uri ...
, joined Fusion-io after leaving Oracle. Fusion-io first filed for an
initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
(IPO) in March 2011, with shares to be listed on the
New York Stock Exchange The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed c ...
with symbol FIO. At the time,
Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
accounted for most of its revenues. In June 2011, Fusion-io announced it increased the price of its IPO to put the company's total value at $1.4 billion. The company had previously priced its shares to value the company at about $1.17 billion. The shares were offered on June 9, raising the valuation to about $2 billion. On August 5, 2011, Fusion-io acquired IO Turbine for about $95 million. IO Turbine's main product was the
hybrid array A hybrid array is a form of hierarchical storage management that combines hard disk drives (HDDs) with solid-state drives (SSDs) for I/O speed improvements. Hybrid storage arrays aim to mitigate the ever increasing price-performance gap between HD ...
(caching to flash) software, which is virtualization-aware, particularly of
VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...
environments. In January 2012, Fusion-io achieved a record breaking billion IOPS from eight servers at the DEMO Enterprise event in San Francisco. In June 2012, the
Btrfs Btrfs (pronounced as "better F S", "butter F S", "b-tree F S", or simply by spelling it out) is a computer storage format that combines a file system based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle with a logical volume manager (not to be confused ...
principal developers Chris Mason joined Fusion-io after leaving Oracle, and Josef Bacik left Red Hat to join Fusion-io. In August 2012, Fusion-io announced the ION Data Accelerator software. Since February 2014, the ION product is offered as an appliance instead of a software product. In March 2013, Fusion-io acquired the Linux
software defined storage Software-defined storage (SDS) is a marketing term for computer data storage software for policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware. Software-defined storage typically includes a form of storag ...
firm ID7, developers of the
SCST SCST is a GPL licensed SCSI target software stack. The design goals of this software stack are high performance, high reliability, strict conformance to existing SCSI standards, being easy to extend and easy to use. SCST does not only support mul ...
generic SCSI target layer. At Storage Field Day 3, Fusion-io announced their acquisition of NexGen Storage in April 2013 for $114 million cash and $5 million in stock. NexGen was located in
Louisville, Colorado The City of Louisville () is a home rule municipality located in southeastern Boulder County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 21,226 at the 2020 United States Census. Louisville began as a mining community in 1877, experienced a ...
and had a product it called n5, which it announced in November 2011 and upgraded in July 2012. The n5 was a hybrid product including
hard disk drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...
s as well as flash memory, aiming to provide more consistent performance guarantees than only disks. The n5 was renamed hybrid storage after acquisition. In May 2013, the co-founders David Flynn (CEO) and Rick White (CMO) left. In October 2013, Dennis Wolff, its CFO, left. In November 2013, the
Btrfs Btrfs (pronounced as "better F S", "butter F S", "b-tree F S", or simply by spelling it out) is a computer storage format that combines a file system based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle with a logical volume manager (not to be confused ...
developers Chris Mason and Josef Bacik left Fusion-io for Facebook. In 2012 and 2013, Fusion-io was criticized for depending too heavily on two major customers—Facebook and Apple. However, during the F2Q 2014 earnings call, it was made clear that in Q2 the orders of twelve customers exceeded $1 million each. A scalable multi-queue block layer for the
Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...
was developed by Fusion-io engineers Axboe and Shaohua Li, and merged into the
Linux kernel mainline The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU o ...
in kernel version 3.13, released on January 19, 2014. This new block layer uses parallelism (and thus provides much higher performance) offered by SSDs using
NVM Express NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The ...
. With the release of Linux kernel version 3.13, only the virtioblk driver has been modified to actually use this new interface. A technical presentation paper of this new feature was published at ACM SYSTOR'13. During the first half of 2014, Fusion-io sponsored conversion of the Linux kernel SCSI core to the blk-mq approach. In January 2014, Jens Axboe announced he was leaving Fusion-io to join Facebook. In June 2014,
SanDisk SanDisk is a brand for flash memory products, including memory cards and readers, USB flash drives, solid-state drives, and digital audio players, manufactured and marketed by Western Digital. The original company, SanDisk Corporation was acquir ...
announced its intentions to buy Fusion-io. SanDisk completed its acquisition of Fusion-io in July 2014.


Technology

Fusion-io called their architecture . It was announced at the DEMO conference in 2007, and software called ioSAN was shown in 2008. In March 2009,
Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...
announced the HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator adaptation of Fusion-io technology specifically for
HP BladeSystem BladeSystem is a line of blade server machines from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (Formerly Hewlett-Packard) that was introduced in June 2006. The BladeSystem forms part of the HPE Converged Systems platform, which use a common converged infras ...
C-Series servers. IBM’s project Quicksilver, based on Fusion-io technology, showed that solid-state technology in 2008 could deliver 1 million
IOPS Input/output operations per second (IOPS, pronounced ''eye-ops'') is an input/output performance measurement used to characterize computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN). Lik ...
. By September 2009, IBM offered a PCIe adapter, based on the ioDrive, for IBM servers. In December 2009, IBM announced it would license the technology for an appliance.


References


External links

* {{Western Digital Companies formerly listed on the New York Stock Exchange Companies based in Salt Lake County, Utah Manufacturing companies based in Utah Computer storage companies Computer peripherals Solid-state computer storage media Computer companies established in 2005 2005 establishments in Nevada 2011 initial public offerings 2014 mergers and acquisitions SanDisk Cottonwood Heights, Utah