Wozniak joins advisory board of flash storage start-up

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is joining forces with a storage start-up that's helping to bring flash memory to the enterprise.

Fusion-io, a presenter at Network World's DEMOfall 08 event, announced Monday that Wozniak is joining the company's advisory board to help ramp up adoption of Fusion-io's flash technology.

In a prepared statement, Wozniak complimented Fusion-io's approach that uses solid-state flash as direct-attached storage.

"Seldom have I seen technology advances that win in almost every way at the same time, in terms of speed, capacity, reliability, endurance, power usage and simplicity," Wozniak said. "The products from Fusion-io are extremely useful to so many different applications, not to mention most of the world's servers."

Wozniak will advise Fusion-io CEO Don Basile on future market trends, consult with senior management on R&D and product road maps, and help Fusion-io find partnerships and sales opportunities, Fusion-io says in a press release.

Fusion-io in late 2007 launched its ioDrive, a PCIe flash storage card that's inserted directly into servers. Last month it released ioSAN, a flash PCIe card designed to deliver a complete storage-area network.

Flash has gained massive popularity in the consumer market, from iPods and cell phones to those ubiquitous USB sticks. Now it's catching on in the enterprise, with businesses utilizing it for frequently accessed data because of its speed.

Fusion-io is competing for attention against storage vendors such as EMC, which has promoted flash technology as an add-on to its Symmetrix storage devices; and Sun, which plans to embed flash drives directly into its own servers.