A SAN in the Hand (Equals Two in the Data Center?)

By Doug Barney

The DEMO conference  is based on a pretty cool conceptbring together a bunch of industry types, entrepreneurs, investors, and a few journalists, and expose them to brand-new companies, products and ideas. If the ideas are good, they'll be written up, invested in, and hopefully scooped up by the buying public.

I pored through dozens of new ideas and found only one worth bringing to you, so here we go.

Fusion-io, based in Salt Lake City (here's an aside. As a press guy I meet with brand new companies from Utah on an almost weekly basis. They always buy me lunch and they almost always have great ideas. My advice: keep your eyes on Utah!).

The idea is to build massive flash drives (we're talking up to a terabyte when several disks are combined) that are small, low power, and very fast (over 400,000 IOs per second). Instead of a huge, power-hogging storage array, you could use a small, efficient little flash drive.

This is a great concept for enterprise storage, but I'm looking for a one terabyte, flash drive iPod! What would you do with a small cheap terabyte device? Give us your best ideas by writing to Doug Barney at barneymailto:[email protected].