The company's new Fusion ION acceleration software runs on tier 1 servers that contain Fusion-io's ioDrive modules, allowing them to act as primary data storage targets -- essentially, flash appliances.

Currently, Fusion-io's ioDrive modules act as internal storage capacity for the servers in order to speed up performance compared to what hard disk drives would offer.

Fusion-io's ioDrive PCIe cards come in (essentially DIMMS) that hold up to 10TB of data in a 1U (1.75-in. high) form factor. The ioDrive modules also come with either lower-performing, lower-cost multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash or higher-end, single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash.

According to David Flynn, co-founder and CEO of Fusion-io, a 1U server using the software can deliver more than one million I/Os per second (IOPS), up to 6GBs throughput and under .06 milliseconds of access latency. "The implication of this is huge," he said. "With just software you can have off-the-shelf servers behave as network storage servers and offering open platforms to customer."

Fusion-io claims its software, working in conjunction with its ioDrive memory modules, can boost application performance from 2X to 25X due to the use of NAND flash versus hard disk drives within the servers.