Woz Lands Chief Scientist Gig at SSD Firm

Steve Wozniak, the man who cofounded Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) but hasn't held an official position there in years, has snagged a job as the chief scientist for Fusion-io, a Salt Lake City-based provider of enterprise solid-state architecture and high-performance I/O (input/output) solutions.

Wozniak will act as a key technical advisor to the Fusion-io research and development group. Plus, he'll work closely with the executive team of Fusion-io in formulating company strategy .

"With the revolutionary technological advances being made by Fusion-io, the company is in the right place at the right time with the right technology and ready to direct the history of technology into the 21st century and beyond," Wozniak noted.

"The technology marketplace has not seen such capacity for innovation and radical transformation since the mainframe computer was replaced by the home computer. Fusion-io's technology is extremely useful to many different applications and almost all of the world's servers," he added.

Prior to his appointment as chief scientist at Fusion-io, Wozniak was a member of the company's advisory board, where Fusion-io he counseled the company on market trends, product road maps and other strategic activities.

40-Hour Work Week?

So is this a full-time job? Is the Woz going to Utah?

Wozniak will be working full time, Lisa Langsdorf, a spokesperson for Fusion-io, told MacNewsWorld, but she doesn't believe Wozniak will be moving to Utah at this time.

Meanwhile, what is it, exactly, that Fusion-io does?

"Fusion-io is playing in pursuing the enterprise-grade SSD (solid-state drive), and this is basically a category that's relatively new. SSDs have been around for a while, and while we're seeing them in notebooks, they're also going into storage and server environments," Joseph Unsworth, a research director for Gartner (NYSE: IT), told MacNewsWorld.

"What's interesting is that this is the area that SSDs have the most compelling value proposition because they can achieve, when done properly, very high performance in terms of I/O with very low latency, and they can really saturate the CPU bandwidth," Unsworth explained.

For example, "Right now, hard drives, using a quad-core CPU in the enterprise for storage, can saturate about 25 percent of that CPU bandwidth. With the right SSD solution, you can get north of 60 to 70 percent utilization, and I think Fusion-io is claiming they can saturate nearly all of that bandwidth. So once you can do that, you're a lot more efficient, and it really helps your total cost of ownership argument."

More specifically, Fusion-io's claim to fame is its ioDrive, which is a direct-attached, solid-state storage technology on PCI-Express (PCIe). As Unsworth suggested, it's data-in, data-out performance is much faster than mechanical (spinning platter) disk drives.

Building on its innovation, the company recently announced two additional products: the ioSAN, which is the first networked enterprise SSD, and the ioXtreme, a consumer product based on the company's ioMemory technology.

In the enterprise, Fusion-io is looking to deliver higher performing, more flexible, and lower-cost storage solutions. In fact, Fusion-io's technology was recently declared the "world's fastest storage" product by several reviewers, Fusion-io boasts, including independent new product testing Web site TweakTown.com.

Fusion-io is currently working with IBM (NYSE: IBM) on its Project Quicksilver to achieve over 1,000,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) by presenting multiple ioDrives as a shared storage solution. The ioDrive is also the first solid-state storage device to receive IBM's ServerProven designation, Fusion-io said.

Challenges Ahead?

As for challenges, Fusion-io is leveraging the PCI-Express interface, Unsworth said. "A lot of companies are looking at it, and it's on their roadmaps, but it's not yet pervasive in the enterprise," he explained.

Overall, there's still a lot of hype over the enterprise SSD market, and while Gartner expects it to grow rapidly, it's still very small. Ironically, Unsworth said, what Fusion-io really needs now is a good competitor to bring more attention and choice to the enterprise SSD storage market for it to really take off.