The afternoon session is focusing on infrastructure and enabling technologies. Fusion-io was one of the brashest presenters, saying its silicon-based ioDrive "will turn disk drives into boat anchors." It has a capacity of 640Gb and does 100,000 seeks per second! 
The CTO and cofounder, David Flynn (on right), said a disk drive only does about 100 IOs per second — so, his ioDrive is 100x of that. "We talking about the equivalent performance of 1000 disk drives," echoed CEO and cofounder Rick White, pointing out the mechanical drive is just inefficient. The solution, he said: "Put it on silicon!" With this product, "we can now put the performance of a SAN onto every server." And, holding up the product, he said it "puts the power of a SAN into the palm of your hand." For more details on what Fusion-io is up to, check out the press release.
DEMOfall 07: Fusion-io Puts Power of SAN in Your Hand
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So a variation on the traditional external RAM/DDR SSD using flash on a PCIe card, or, if you have not seen, similar to what Texas Memory Systems (TMS) announced a week or so go as a real SAN attached meaning sharable across multiple servers using FC or InfiniBand and scalable up to 2TB with DDR ram to accelerate write performance not just reads. If you really want fast reads, if its local reads that you want, why not use a RAM disk or cache like that provided via Symantecs storage foundation if you have some extra RAM laying around, or, an external SSD using DDR or FLASH like those from Curtis or TMS. However, buyer beware when it comes to SSD and FLASH and that is for write intensive workloads, FLASH has some issues compared to traditional DDR/RAM based flash so do your homework. As to the end of the hard disk drive (HDD) due to a PCIe FLASH card, not quite, if anything, it will be the Hybrid HDD (HHDD) drives that realy threaten the HDD, needless to say, the HDD has several years of useful life in front of it.
Cheers
GS
Founder and Sr. Analyst – The StorageIO Group
Author – Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
http://www.storageio.com
Thanks for the comment, Greg. I’ve asked the CEO of Fusion-io for a response — but, so far, nothing….
Meantime, here’s another take on Fusion-io that came out after DEMOfall, appearing in Techworld.