Flash in the Enterprise: Cache or Persistent Storage?

Mat joined Fusion-io as the first employee in EMEA in July 2009, having contributed to the build out of Fusion-io across EMEA. Mat is now responsible for the Marketing EMEA. As someone that has been fortunate enough to have witnessed the storage revolution from DAS to SAN and now solid state, Mat has a wide range of experience in driving storage to deliver application performance. Mat first started out in IT in the late 90's at Data General, working with a range of products in particular the Clariion as its evolved from a 7 disk SCSI DAS into part of the SAN revolution. After DG Mat spent several years at Microsoft in a number of roles starting in consultancy, working with enterprise and government accounts around Microsoft applications and their integration with enterprise storage, to then finally working for the Product Groups specialising in storage related technologies in the Microsoft eco-system. After leaving Microsoft Mat worked with several other enterprise storage companies before joining Fusion-io.

The increasing demand for a next-generation, solid-state storage technology is driven by advancements in computer processors which, following Moore's Law, have grown exponentially in performance. Mechanical disks, on the other hand, follow Newtonian Dynamics and experience lackluster performance improvements, introducing a performance gap.

Ushering in a new era of application-centric, solid-state storage solutions for the enterprise, Fusion-io is revolutionizing the way database, application and system administrators architect their data centers. The company is closing the gap between processing power and storage needs by delivering breakthrough performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional disk-based storage systems. Now, the performance of an entire disk array can be placed inside a server.

Fusion-io's executive team has a long history of building companies that deliver game-changing and innovative technologies to the marketplace. Fusion-io was founded in 2006 by a team of experts with successful track records in the fields of transaction processing, high-performance networking, storage and superclusters, and computing and image processing.

Coming out of stealth mode in late 2007, Fusion-io was backed with an initial round of funding led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Dell Ventures, and Sumitomo Ventures. In 2009, Lightspeed Venture Partners joined these forward-thinking organizations to lead Fusion-io's second round of financing.