Steve Wozniak Joins Fusion-io Advisory Board

Fusion-io, provider of enterprise solid-state architecture and high-performance I/O solutions, announced that Steve Wozniak has joined the company’s advisory board. Wozniak is co-founder of Apple Inc. and the engineer who launched the home computer revolution.

In his role at Fusion-io, Wozniak will advise the company’s CEO, Don Basile, on future market trends; consult with senior management on company R&D efforts and product road-mapping; and introduce Fusion-io to key strategic alliances in the industry, as well as sales opportunities.

“Seldom have I seen technology advances that win in almost every way at the same time, in terms of speed, capacity, reliability, endurance, power usage and simplicity,” said Wozniak. “The products from Fusion-io are extremely useful to so many different applications, not to mention most of the world’s servers.”

Fusion-io’s solid state storage solutions bring storage speeds up to the level of processing power, making storage a high-performance partner with processing, not a drag on system productivity.

The company’s first product, the ioDrive, is the first direct-attached solid-state drive (SSD) on a PCI-Express (PCIe), with I/O performance outstripping that of mechanical disks by hundreds of times. Building on this innovation, the company has recently announced the ioSAN, which is the first networked enterprise SSD. The ioSAN utilizes the same PCIe form factor as the ioDrive, while also adding high-speed network interfaces. This innovation allows the ioSAN to function as network-attached storage, making it possible for server-attached storage to communicate between systems over existing network architecture in virtual network storage arrays.

By creating components that can easily drop into any server to build high-performance network storage, Fusion-io is enabling the enterprise to use an off-the-shelf server to create a complete storage area network (SAN), with multi-terabytes of low-cost, tiered storage, including high-performance enterprise flash and high-speed enterprise networking. The easy-to-deploy-and-manage solutions from Fusion-io will facilitate the enterprise’s migration away from proprietary SAN architecture to lower-cost storage solutions that offer far greater performance and flexibility.

“Steve Wozniak played a significant role in the invention of the home computer and, in doing so, helped companies move from monolithic, proprietary mainframes to today’s more open and easy-to-manage client server architecture,” said Basile. “We are honored that Steve has joined our company and we look forward to the influence his imagination and guidance will have on Fusion-io and our technology. Steve’s understanding and recognition of the game-changing nature of our technology is further proof of the transformative power Fusion-io is bringing to the enterprise marketplace.”