Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: Fusion-io

DEMOfall 07: Fusion-io Puts Power of SAN in Your Hand

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! Demofall07fusionio
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: What I Like So Far

The Bayview Lawn at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina was buzzing bigtime starting at 6:00 last evening to kick off DEMOfall 2007. Georgeous weather, sumptuous food, great friends, new people from all over the place, and tech talk flying in every direction. Does it get any better than this? I was so busy meeting new people and getting pitched, I didn’t even have a chance to shoot many photos. Demofall07party
Okay, one decent shot, and here it is: (from left) Marc Orchant, newly of Blognation…Aaron Fulkerson, cofounder of Mindtouch (who just who strolled over from his offices)…Shel Israel of Global Neighbourhoods…and Luis Villalobos, founder of Tech Coast Angels. [Man, I love the mixes I can put together at these events!] But if you want to see more photos, just check out these from Brian Solis, who does much better than I ever could. (Brian, you da man.)

But what new stuff did I hear about at the party that I like?  Well, for starters, Naomi Wall, content dev chief at MetaRADAR, told me they’ll be introducing a "media masher" that brings all your rich media content together, bridging the gap between websites, desktop apps, and mobil devices. And I also was glad to run into the guys from mSpoke in Pittsburgh (yes, some of those smart Carnegie Mellon dudes) — Sean Ammirati, VP biz dev (a colleague from Read/Write Web, who I’d only met online up till now), and Dave Mawhinney, CEO. They’re launching FeedHub, a whiz-bang new technology to help with your RSS information overload.  We’re talking a personalization engine that dynamically adapts to your reading habits. This is a space I’ve been following, and I just knew we’d be seeing some solutions to this problem soon. Bring it on, baby. A bloke from Manchester, UK, told me about YuuGuu, which lets you instantly share your screen in real-time with anyone, anywhere. Blimey, dude! The founder of LongJump told me about his firm’s online catalog of apps for small business, which can be customized via drag-and-drop. Then, lo and behold, I met a storage startup!  Fusion-io of Salt Lake City I learned will be introducing a revolutionary stroage architecture that puts SAN or NAS on silicon (high-density NAND), with access rates comparable to DRAM with the storage capacity of disk. DEMO says it "may prove to be among the most important products ever to launch" at their events. Yikes! Then, on the way back into the hotel bar [yes, the party continued inside, till God’s knows when], I ran into the the founder of iForem, which has a subscription-free service to store,protect and share intellectual property — an online safe deposit box for businesses and consumers, with a trust account. And then the folks from ideablob (site to
go live later this morning) caught me — we were the last ones on the lawn! — and told me their new venture is funded by
Advanta in Philly [how do all the PA startups find me?] This site is an open
community for small businesses, where members vote on new ideas and get
valuable advice and feedback from one another.  And get this: you can
actually win cash for your idea.

As the evening continued, I had a great chat with my longtime buddies Steve Larsen of Krugle and Shel Israel of Global Neighbourhoods, solving all the world’s problems. Then, it was beddy-bye time so I could get up early and write this post.  More soon!