Most of us are happy with a standard SSD drive setup right now, however Fusion IO have a new toy out called the IoDrive Octal - a PCI Express 2.0 16x card which holds eight IoDrives (SSDs) to create stunning raid style performance when compared with even a traditional Raio 0 configuration.
This device is obviously not aimed at the mass market due to cost but a configuration of 220 of these cards using InfiniBand switched fabric technology and Sun's open source Lustre parallel file system enabled a 1TB/s sustained data transfer rate.
Each IoDrive Octal card is capable of delivering 5TB of storage and 6GB/s of bandwidth. 220 ioDrive Octal cards which would comprise 1,760 individual ioDrive SSDs (a lot of money), but Fusion-IO say that in order to get the same throughput from a traditional storage network you would require 55,440 hard disks with 396 Storage Area Network controllers and 792 input-output servers - a total overhead of 132 full-size racks of equipment. The ioDrive-based system takes up less than a 20th of this space.
Even more interesting is the fact that the Apple co founder Steve Wozniak is the chieft scientist at the company - he said : "IOPS [Input/Output Operations Per Second] are easy," and that "the real power in our architecture was the ability to also scale bandwidth."
Woziak has stated that he would love to bring a commercial version to market in the future with a consumer version shortly afterwards.
