Fusion-io

Fusion-io
Subsidiary
Industry Solid State Storage
Founded 2005
Headquarters San Jose, California, Cottonwood Heights, Utah, U.S.
Key people
 Shane Robison,[1] President and CEO
Steve Wozniak, Chief Scientist
Products
Parent SanDisk Corporation
Website www.fusionio.com
Electronics card
HP IO Accelerator card in 2009
NexGen n5 in 2012, renamed ioControl hybrid storage
ION Accelerator

Fusion-io, Inc. is a computer hardware and software systems company based in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, that designs and manufactures products using flash memory technology. The Fusion ioMemory platform accelerates enterprise applications such as databases, virtualization, cloud computing, big data by integrating hardware and software to overcome the limitations of legacy architectures and specialized hardware.[2]

History

The company was founded in December 2005 as Canvas Technologies in Nevada. Co-founders were David Flynn and Rick White. The company is based in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, near Salt Lake City. In June 2006 the company name was changed to Fusion Multisystems, Incorporated.[3][4] A product with the brand name ioDrive was demonstrated and announced in September 2007.[5]

In March 2008, Fusion-io raised $19 million in a Series A round of funding from a group of investors led by New Enterprise Associates.[6] David Flynn was chief technology officer, while Don Basile was chief executive officer at the time.[6] Michael Dell invested in Fusion-io during this round.[7]

In February 2009 it hired Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak as chief scientist.[8] In May 2010, the Linux block-io principal developer, Jens Axboe, joined Fusion-io after leaving Oracle.[9]

Fusion-io raised $47.5 million in a Series B round of funding from investors led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in April 2009.[10] Samsung later invested in Fusion-io in October 2009, signaling a deeper partnership between the two companies.[11]

A third round of funding led by Meritech Capital Partners, with additional capital from Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, provided a total of $45 million in April 2010.[12] It was named the second most promising information technology company by The Wall Street Journal in March 2010.[13]

Fusion-io first filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in March 2011, with shares to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange with symbol FIO.[4] At the time, Facebook 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.[14] The shares were offered on June 9, raising the valuation to about $2 billion.[15]

On August 5, 2011, Fusion-io acquired IO Turbine for about $95 million.[16] IO Turbine's main product was the ioTurbine hybrid array (caching to flash) software, which is virtualization-aware, particularly of VMware environments.[17][18]

In January 2012, Fusion-io achieves a record breaking billion IOPS from eight servers at the DEMO Enterprise event in San Francisco.

In June 2012, the Btrfs principal developer Chris Mason joined Fusion-io after leaving Oracle.[19] In June 2012 Josef Bacik - the Btrfs file system developer - left Red Hat to join Fusion-io.[20]

In August 2012 Fusion-io announced the ION Data Accelerator software.[21] Since February 2014 the ION product is offered as an appliance instead of a software product.[22]

In March 2013, Fusion-io acquired the Linux software defined storage firm ID7, developers of the SCST generic SCSI target layer.[23][24]

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.[25][26] NexGen was located in Louisville, Colorado and had a product it called n5, which it announced in November 2011 and upgraded in July 2012.[27][28][29] The n5 was a hybrid product including hard disk drives as well as flash memory, aiming to provide more consistent performance guarantees than only disks.[30] The n5 was renamed ioControl hybrid storage after acquisition.[31]

In May 2013 the co-founders David Flynn (CEO) and Rick White (CMO) left. In October 2013 Dennis Wolff, its CFO, was leaving.[32][33]

In November 2013 the Btrfs developers Chris Mason and Josef Bacik left Fusion-io for Facebook.[34][35]

A scalable multi-queue block layer for the Linux kernel has been developed by Fusion-io engineers Jens Axboe and Shaohua Li, and merged into the Linux kernel mainline in kernel version 3.13, released on 19 January 2014. This new block layer leverages the parallelism (and thus provides much higher performance) offered by SSDs using NVM Express. With the release of Linux kernel version 3.13, only the virtioblk driver has been modified to actually use this new interface; other drivers will be ported in the following releases. A technical presentation paper of this new feature was previously published at ACM SYSTOR'13.[36][37][38]

In January 2014, Jens Axboe announced he was leaving Fusion-io to join Facebook.[39]

In June 2014, SanDisk announced its intentions to buy Fusion-io, with the deal expected to close in the third quarter of the year.[40] SanDisk completed its acquisition of Fusion-io in July 2014.[41]

Technology

Fusion-io calls their SSD architecture ioMemory.[5] It was announced at the DEMO conference in 2007, and software called ioSAN was shown in 2008.[42]

In March 2009, Hewlett-Packard announced the HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator adaptation of Fusion-io technology specifically for HP's BladeSystem C-Series servers.[43][44]

Fusion-io has other partnerships with IBM, Dell, Cisco, Fujitsu and Supermicro.[7][45] IBM’s project Quicksilver,[46] based on Fusion-io technology, showed that solid-state technology in 2008 could deliver 1 million IOPS.[47] As of December 2009, IBM offered the High IOPS SSD PCIe Adapter, based on the ioDrive, for IBM servers.[45][48]

Customers

In the past Fusion-io has been repeatedly criticized for depending too heavily on two major customers—Facebook and Apple.[49][50][51] However, during the F2Q 2014 earnings call it was made clear that in Q2 the orders of twelve customers exceeded $1 million each.[52]

Nods

Chosen as Red Herring Top 100 Global Company in February 2009.[53]

Chosen “No. 1 innovation up-and-comer in the world” by BusinessWeek reader poll.[7]

References

  1. ↑ "Management Team :: Fusion-io". Retrieved 2013-05-28.
  2. ↑ "About Company". Fusion-io fusionio.com.
  3. ↑ "Entity Actions for Fusion Multisystems, Inc.". Company registration information. Nevada Secretary of State. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Fusion-io (March 9, 2011). "Prospectus". Form S-1. US Securities and Exchange Commission. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Fusion-io announces ioDrive, placing the power of a SAN in the palm of your hand" (PDF). Press release. Fusion-io. September 25, 2007. Archived from the original (PDF) on May 9, 2010. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Fusion-io Closes $19M in Series A Funding" (PDF). Press release. NEA. March 31, 2008. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Arik Hesseldahl (March 30, 2009). "How Fusion-io Improves Companies' Memory". Business Week. Bloomberg. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  8. ↑ Vance, Ashlee (2009-02-04). "Wozniak Accepts Post at a Storage Start-Up". The New York Times.
  9. ↑ Jens Axboe (2010-05-31). "Last Day at Oracle".
  10. ↑ Murph, Darren (2009-04-07). "Fusion-io nabs more funding, teases new PCIe-based ioSAN". engadet.com.
  11. ↑ Savov, Vlad (2009-10-21). "Samsung invests in Fusion-io, takes relationship to 'a new level'". engadget.com.
  12. ↑ Don Clark (April 18, 2010). "Storage Startup Fusion-io Continues Rapid Pace". Digits blog. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved October 14, 2013.
  13. ↑ Debaise, Colleen and Scott Austin (2010-03-09). "Sizing Up Promising Young Firms". The Wall Street Journal.
  14. ↑ Leena Rao (June 7, 2011). "Fusion-io Ups Price Of IPO To $16 To $18 Per Share; Now Valued At $1.4 Billion". Tech Crunch. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  15. ↑ Scott Austin (June 9, 2011). "On IPO Day, Fusion-io Valued At Just Under $2B". Venture Capital Dispatch (Wall Street Journal). Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  16. ↑ "After Strong IPO, Fusion-io Buys IO Turbine For About $95M". Dow Jones. Retrieved June 3, 2013.
  17. ↑ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/17/fusionio_makes_ioturbine_slicker/
  18. ↑ http://www.pcworld.com/article/2042805/fusionio-updates-ioturbine-to-aid-more-types-of-onserver-caching.html
  19. ↑ Chris Mason (2012-06-07). "Leaving Oracle".
  20. ↑ Josef Bacik (2012-06-20). "Leaving Red Hat".
  21. ↑ "Fusion-io Introduces ION Data Accelerator Software Defined Storage". Press release. Fusion-io. 2012-08-01.
  22. ↑ "Application Acceleration Appliances". Press release. Fusion-io. 2014-02-06.
  23. ↑ Meyer, David (2013-03-18). "ID7 buy takes Fusion-io deeper into software-defined storage". ComputerWeekly.com.
  24. ↑ Adshead, Antony (2013-03-18). "Fusion-io picks up software-defined storage firm ID7 for SCST chops". gigaom.
  25. ↑ Joey Ferguson (May 1, 2013). "Fusion-io, NexGen CEOs talk acquisition, integration". Silicon Slopes. Retrieved October 14, 2013.
  26. ↑ "Fusion-io Acquires NexGen Storage". Press release (Fusion-io). April 24, 2013. Retrieved October 14, 2013.
  27. ↑ "Delivers First SAN Storage System with Quality of Service for Business Critical Virtualization". Press release (NexGen Storage). November 8, 2011. Archived from the original on November 15, 2011. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  28. ↑ Drew Robb (August 13, 2012). "5 Flash Storage Vendors That Shine". Infostor. Retrieved October 14, 2013.
  29. ↑ Nathan Eddy (July 23, 2012). "NexGen Releases n5 Series Solid State Storage Appliances". eWeek. Retrieved October 14, 2013.
  30. ↑ Enterprise Strategy Group (April 5, 2012). "NexGen n5 Storage System: Storage QoS with ‘Cruise Control’ Performance" (PDF). Promotional review. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  31. ↑ "NexGen Storage is now ioControl Hybrid Storage". Archived from the original on June 28, 2013. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  32. ↑ Fusion-io Plunges Most Ever After CEO, Co-Founder Resign, Bloomberg, 2013-05-08.
  33. ↑ More Bad News From Steve Wozniak's Fusion-IO: A Crummy Outlook And The CFO Is Leaving, Business Insider, 2013-10-23.
  34. ↑ Leaving Fusion-io, Chris Mason, 2013-11-27.
  35. ↑ Josef Backik leaving Fusion-io, 2013-11-27.
  36. ↑ "1.1 A scalable block layer for high-performance SSD storage". Linux 3.13. kernelnewbies.org. 2014-01-19. Retrieved 2014-01-25.
  37. ↑ Jonathan Corbet (2013-06-05). "The multiqueue block layer". LWN.net. Retrieved 2014-01-25.
  38. ↑ Matias Bjørling; Jens Axboe; David Nellans; Philippe Bonnet (2013). "Linux Block IO: Introducing Multi-queue SSD Access on Multi-core Systems" (PDF). kernel.dk. ACM. Retrieved 2014-01-25.
  39. ↑ Leaving Fusion-io, Jens Axboe, 2014-01-24.
  40. ↑ SanDisk to buy Fusion-io to boost flash storage business, Reuters, 2014-06-16.
  41. ↑ Sandisk completes acquisition of Fusion-io, Sandisk, 2014-07-23.
  42. ↑ "Fusion-io". DEMO Fall 2008 conference alumni information. IDG. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  43. ↑ Chris Preimesberger (April 6, 2009). "1M IOPs from Flash - actions speak louder than words". eWweek.
  44. ↑ Fusion-io (March 3, 2009). "Fusion-io Joins with HP to Accelerate Enterprise Server Application Performance for HP BladeSystem Customers" (PDF). Press release. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 20, 2009. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
  45. ↑ 45.0 45.1 Preimesberger, Chris (2009-12-09). "IBM Hooks Up with Wozniak, Fusion-io in OEM Pact for SSDs". eweek.com. Retrieved 2010-07-28.
  46. ↑ "Fusion-io and IBM Team to Improve Enterprise Storage Performance". Fusion-io. 2008-09-03. Retrieved 2010-08-03.
  47. ↑ Whyte, Barry (2008-08-20). "1M IOPs from Flash - actions speak louder than words". IBM.com.
  48. ↑ "IBM Solid State Storage - PCIe Adapters". IBM.com. Retrieved 2010-07-22.
  49. ↑ Wolfgang Gruener (October 26, 2012), "Fusion-io Buzzing Because of Apple, Facebook", Tom's Hardware
  50. ↑ Rex Crum, (Jan. 31, 2013) "Fusion-io Falls 12% on Apple, Facebook Order Delays", Wall Street Journal
  51. ↑ Chris Mellor (9th August 2013), "Flash angel Fusion-io flies too close to Facebook, Apple, plummets to Earth", The Register
  52. ↑ "Fusion-io's CEO Discusses F2Q 2014 Results - Earnings Call Transcript". January 22, 2014.
  53. ↑ "Fusion-io Awarded Red Herring Top 100 Global Company". fusionio.com. Retrieved 2011-10-22.

External links