Fusion-io announced on Wednesday its newest product line, Fusion ioScale. The ioScale is available for hyperscale and cloud companies in minimum order quantities of one hundred units. Each ioScale provides up to 3.2TB of reliable performance-tuned Fusion ioMemory. With prices starting at $3.89 per 1GB with discounts based on volume, ioScale claims to make it practical to architect an all-flash datacenter at scale.

“By making ioScale available to growing webscale and emerging cloud companies, Fusion-io is at the forefront of the transition to the all-flash hyperscale datacenter, powered by open software defined solutions,” said David Flynn, chief executive and chairman of Fusion-io.

Fusion ioScale solid-state drives feature proprietary controller as well as 3.2TB capacity on a half-length PCI Express card (which scales to 12.8TB per server). The SSDs provide enterprise reliability with the self-healing, wear management and predictive monitoring capabilities of Fusion ioMemory. Hyperscale servers supporting UEFI can boot from Fusion ioScale, eliminating the need for RAID controllers or disk infrastructure in spartan webscale servers with limited space.

Fusion ioScale evolved from the high volume Fusion ioFX workstation acceleration products. Fusion ioScale delivers on the unique needs of webscale and emerging cloud companies, meeting their requirements for price, maximum rack density and trusted Fusion-io reliability. As the industry shifts to open software defined datacenters, solutions like ioScale are powerful I/O engines that dramatically improve the performance and efficiency of hyperscale infrastructure.

“Hyperscale companies are an entirely different market with different needs compared to enterprise organizations. Fusion ioScale has been specifically designed with the input of existing hyperscale market leaders to maximize the simplicity of the all-flash datacenter and meet the unique needs of webscale customers. Fusion-io is pleased to now be able to offer this technology to emerging market leaders to help them redefine what's possible when it comes to cost effectively delivering rich data services to millions of people around the world," said Mr. Flynn.

Simplified, higher density and more reliable servers make the hyperscale all-flash datacenter more efficient than datacenters based on solid state disk and hard disk systems. The reduced floor space requirements, lower power consumption, and the tolerance of wider temperature and humidity ranges dramatically reduce operational costs and environmental impact through an all-flash hyperscale datacenter.

“We’re thrilled to see Fusion-io launching ioScale in conjunction with the Open Compute Summit and making this high-performance, low-power technology more broadly available. We’ve been involved in all stages of the product’s research and development, and we’re excited by this technology’s potential to help the industry meet its rapidly growing storage demands,” said Frank Frankovsky, chairman of the open compute foundation and vice president of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook.

Tags: Fusion-io, SSD, PCI Express, NAND, Flash