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Wozniak Accepts Post At a Storage Systems Start-Up
Hugh Pickens writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is going back to work as chief scientist at Fusion-io, a start-up company that tweaks computers to let them tap vast amounts of storage at very quick rates. In the early days of Apple, Wozniak stood out as one of Silicon Valley's most creative engineers, demonstrating a knack for elegant computer designs that made efficient use of components and combined many features into a cohesive package and Wozniak will do similar work at Fusion-io, although this time with larger server computers and storage systems rather than PCs. 'I have a pretty quiet life, and I like to watch technology evolve,' says Wozniak. 'In this case, I like the people and the product, and said I would like some greater involvement.'"
OK, let's look at what was available in 1976, when the Apple-1 came out.
In single-board computers, which the Apple-1 was... there was, what, the KIM-1? Amazingly primitive compared to the Apple-1.
In backplane computers, there were the S100 bus machines, which cost significantly more to do what the Apple-1 could do with one board.
Now, for the C64... it came out in 1982, no? Of course some features are going to be advanced beyond what the Apple II could offer at the time. Keep in mind, though, that the Apple II was still quite competitive against the C64.
The Amiga... I'm not gonna dispute that it had better hardware than the Mac. (Although, the Mac arguably had a more intuitive UI.) But, I will use the Apple IIGS, which had by far the best sound chip of anything in its time. (Yes, I'm fully aware that this sound chip was gimped by not offering stereo sound without an add-on board. But still.)
Plus, the Apple II did offer quite a lot of expansion, which is something that many of its competitors lacked (or didn't do as well.)
In other words, Yet Another Half-Baked Clustered/Distributed Filesystem we can add to the list of dozens of failed distributed/clustered filesystems.
Um... not even close?
This isn't a clustered/distributed anything. It's also not "virtual".
It's a very real, very fast, local storage for very real computers - servers mostly, but if you've got a few grand to blow on an extreme gaming rig, why not go the extra bit to make your levels load faster?
Their quoted numbers are per PCIe X4 device >100,000 IOPS and >640MB/s both reading and writing, and they have independent benchmarks back that up. They're not kidding. The game has changed. This changes everything about how traditional workloads are configured, when you use a SAN vs local disk, how much throughput your apps can get, how many VMs you can run in a server... basically everything in the server world except where you store the data. You still want to store the data in the SAN for redundancy reasons.
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The expected lifetime on the Intel X25-e is about 24 years in an enterprise server. The products of the company in TFA likewise. Use of SLC, sparing, internal error detection and correction, wear levelling and virtual block addressing add up to devices that are not only ridiculously fast - they also last a long time and degrade gracefully (pdf).
Both the Intel SSDs and the IODrive are internally massively parallel.
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