http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/flash-fusion-io-apple-facebook/

Donni writes about this Salt Lake City Company and their use of flash memory.

"Inside a data center like the one Apple operates in Maiden, North Carolina, you’ll find thousands of computer servers. Fusion-io makes a slim card that slots inside these machines, and it’s packed with hundreds of gigabytes of flash memory, the same stuff that holds all the software and the data on your smartphone. You can think of this card as a much-needed replacement for the good old-fashioned hard disk that typically sits inside a server. Much like a hard disk, it stores information. But it doesn’t have any moving parts, which means it’s generally more reliable. It consumes less power. And it lets you read and write data far more quickly.

But that’s only one way to think about it. The same card can also act like a beefed-up version of a server’s main memory subsystem — the place where the central processor temporarily caches data it needs quick access to. You see, today’s super-fast processors have outstripped not only the hard disk, but main memory — the hard disk is too slow, the memory too small — and with its flash cards, Fusion-io aims to remove both bottlenecks.

“You can make it look like traditional storage if you want to, but it can also give you the appearance of more memory inside a system,” says Fusion-io CEO David Flynn, the engineer who founded the company in 2006, alongside a serial entrepreneur named Rick White. “We called it Fusion-io because it was a fusion of memory and storage. They weren’t two separate things.”

ORY