The manufacturer solid-state storage devices, Fusion-io unveiled its new product, ioDrive Duo, which it claims is "the fastest server-based solid-state drive," on Thursday. Fusion-io claimed that it has dubled the storage capacity in its ioDrive Duo.

Fusion-io stated that the PCI Express-based ioDrive Duo is capable of storing up to 640GB of data and moving it at up to 1.5GB per second of sustained throughput.

Fusion-io CTO David Flynn said that the performance for multiple ioDrive Duos scales linearly; for instance, using four ioDrive Duos, an IT company can scale performance to 6GB per second of read bandwidth and more than
500,000- read input/output operations per second (IOPS) that is a common benchmark used with servers to find the best storage configuration.

The ioDrive Duo is based on PCI Express x8 or PCI Express 2.0 x4 standards that can sustain up to 20GB per second of raw throughput. The new ioDrive Duo can sustain 1.5GB per second of read bandwidth and nearly 200,000 read IOPS.

According to Fusion-io, its ioDrive Duo can sustain read bandwidth 1.5 GBps (1,500MB/sec, 32K packet size) and can sustain write bandwidth 1.4 GBps (1,400MB/sec, 32K packet size). It can achieve 186,000 read IOPS and 167,000 write IOPS. Its latency < 50 µsec. The ioDrive Duo comes with optional RAID-1 mirroring between two ioMemory modules on the same ioDrive Duo for full redundancy on a single PCIe card, for security.

"Our application-centric SSDs can be a better picks than disk arrays used in storage area networks," Flynn said, "Many database and system administrators are finding that SANs are too expensive and don't meet performance, protection and capacity utilization expectations. The ioDrive Duo offers the enterprise the advantages of application-centric storage without application-specific programming."

Fusion-io announced that ioDrive Duo will be released in April. It will be released in 160 GB, 320 GB and 640 GB capacities, and in the second half of the year, it will be released in 1.28 TB capacity. Fusion-io did not disclose price information of different versions of ioDrive Duo.