This article is more than 1 year old

Fusion-io gobbles Brit Linux SCSI gurus ID7

Seasoned with PCIe cards, flash and cash

Fusion-io flogs software to turn a server fitted with its PCIe flash cards into a shared storage appliance. It turns out that the software is based on UK developer ID7's code and Fusion-io has just bought the company.

ID7 was set up in 2006 and produces SCST, an open-source Linux component used by many storage vendors. It is a layer of code that hooks a physical or virtual backend storage system to the system's SCSI drivers via iSCSI, Fibre Channel, FCoE, SAS, InfiniBand (SRP) and Wide (parallel) SCSI.

In doing so it provides replication, thin provisioning, deduplication, high availability, and automatic backup with low overhead. In other words it is a form of software-defined storage.

Fusion-io's products veep Gary Orenstein said Fusion-io would maintain "an open source version of SCST [and] continue to contribute to the open source distribution as we develop software solutions to help define the all-flash datacenter”. The company's ION Data Accelerator product, which uses SCST, is likely to be extended, perhaps with support for more than one node, and is set to work with Fusion-io's ioScale cost-reduced PCIe cards for mass use in cloud-scale data centres.

The acquisition price is a secret. The ID7 team, including the primary SCST developers, will join Fusion-io's ION Data Accelerator crew, and collaborate, as they have been doing, with Fusion-io engineers from their locations across Europe and the United States.

Vlad Bolkhovitin, the founder and primary developer of the SCST SCSI target subsystem for Linux, said: “By joining the Fusion-io team, we are pleased to be able to provide SCST with more engineering resources and talent to support the development of the open source and commercial SCST subsystems as we meet the needs of Fusion-io customers around the globe.” ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like