February 5th, 2009
Steve Wozniak: Chief Scientist - of a storage company?
You’d think after co-founding one of the great success stories of the last 35 years - Apple Computer - Steve Wozniak would be done with startups. And you’d be wrong.
But a storage startup? How sexy is that?
The Woz gets storage
Really, this isn’t a stretch. One of the key differentiators of the Apple ][ was its disk subsystem: a mighty 140 KB 5.25″ floppy disk that cost a mere $800!
It was so cheap because Steve W. is an extremely clever engineer. As Andy Hertzfeld - another Apple legend - put it:
The Apple II disk controller, designed six months after the Apple II itself was complete, was Steve Wozniak’s crowning achievement. His five chip disk controller card out-performed competitive controllers that were four times as expensive by shifting most of the responsibilities from hardware to software.
Steve gets game-changers
Fusion-io isn’t just another flash SSD company. They’ve taken a fundamentally different approach to flash: instead of sticking it behind a SATA disk interface, they’ve put it on the PCIe bus to minimize latency and maximize bandwidth.
A thin driver makes it look like a disk to the OS, but the performance is way higher. This has some very positive effects on server performance.
The Storage Bits take
Don’t be hatin’ on me because I’ve been following - and working with - the Fusion-io folks. Fusion-io has a great architecture that really is an economic game-changer.
And they have more on the way. They aren’t a 1-trick pony.
Comments welcome, of course.
Robin Harris has been messing with computers for over 30 years and selling and marketing data storage for over 20 in companies large and small. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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