In the world of super fast solid state drives, it is very difficult to beat Fusion-io. And with the introduction of ioDrive Octal SSD the firm has once again proved that their SSD devices are the best in terms of speed. The firm recently announced that its newest product -- ioDrive Octal -- is capable of sustaining over one terabyte per second (1TB/s) of aggregate bandwidth with access latencies under 50 microseconds. In fact its drives are so fast that it will deploy custom installations based on its ioMemory technology at two presently undisclosed government organizations.

Achieving a 1TB/s sustained bandwidth with existing state-of-the-art storage technologies requires close to 55,440 disk drives, 396 SAN controllers, 792 I/O servers and 132 racks of equipment.

Fusion-io can achieve this same bandwidth with a mere 220 ioDrive Octal cards, housed in Infiniband-attached I/O servers running the Lustre parallel file system. This 1TB/s Fusion-io based solution requires only six racks or less than 1/20th the rack space of an equivalent, high-performance, hard disk drive-based storage system.

The ioDrive Octal is a custom PCI Express card, holding eight ioMemory Modules - putting the equivalent capacity and performance of eight ioDrives into a single card. The ioDrive Octal fits any PCI Express x16 Gen2 double-wide slot, the same as those used for high performance graphics cards, and it is capable of saturating the full performance of that slot.

Features include 800,000 IOPS (4k packet size), 6 GB/s bandwidth, and 5 TB maximum capacity.

No word on pricing.