A start-up founded by former Sun Microsystems computer scientists is tapping IBM and Intel hardware to accelerate the enormous server workloads of burgeoning Web 2.0 businesses.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Schooner Information Technology announced Monday that it is readying a server appliance based on Intel's newest Nehalem processors and its solid-state drives. The first products are due by the end of May with volume shipments in the third quarter of 2009.

Hewlett-Packard and Fusion-io said recently that they are working on analogous technology and had achieved extremely high performance using Fusion-io's solid-state drives running on HP servers.

Schooner Information Technology's President and CEO John R. Busch was formerly research director of computer system architecture and analysis at Sun laboratories. Chairman and CTO Tom McWilliams was a lead engineer at Sun, working on server architecture and advanced CAD tools. Prior to that, McWilliams was a director in the MIPS division of Silicon Graphics. Both men were involved in moving Sun to multicore server architectures, according to Busch.

The company is funded by CMEA Capital and Redpoint Ventures. The current total investment is $15 million.

In a phone interview Monday, CEO Busch explained that the company has set out to fuse standalone high-performance server technologies into a faster organic whole. "Computer companies are pretty much selling boxes while others are selling networking. They're basically just selling component technologies," he said. "If you just speed up the processor or speed up the interconnect or add in flash drives, it will have a small effect."

"The observation I had when we started the company was that we really need to make a shift and we really need to put the middleware application and (our) new operating environment together with these technologies--tightly coupled with parallel flash memory and with Intel multicore processors. As opposed to loosely coupled, in order to bring their real inherent benefits through," Busch said. … Read more

Updated at 3:45 p.m. PDT with additional information throughout.

Intel released a fix for its solid-state drives Monday, addressing an issue first reported back in February.

"We are releasing an end-user firmware update for our X-25M and X-18M SSD drives today," Intel said Monday.

Intel said this addresses a problem first introduced by technology Web site PC Perspective in February. "This update implements several continuous improvements and optimizations to the drive algorithms including a resolution for a performance issue first reported by the PC Perspective," Intel said.

The PC Perspective review, titled "Long-term … Read more

Fusion-io, the company that boasts Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, says it has achieved extremely high data transfer speeds on servers from Hewlett-Packard.

Solid-state drives are generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at reading data, and have no moving parts, unlike hard disk drives.

Working together in HP's ProLiant engineering labs in Houston, HP and Fusion-io built a system using five 320GB ioDrive Duos (see photo) and six 160GB ioDrives in a single HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server, running with four Quad-Core Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, Fusion-io said.

This configuration allowed the engineers to … Read more

Fusion-io on Wednesday announced the IoDrive Duo, which the company claims is the fastest to date. Fusion-io also claims Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist.

Targeted primarily at business applications such as database servers, capacities range from 160 gigabytes to 640 gigabytes. And by the second half of this year, this will increase to 1.28 terabytes.

The boards are based on PCI Express data bus and can sustain up to 20 gigabits per second of raw throughput--many times the rate of fast hard-disk drives. Sustained read bandwidth is 1,500 megabytes per second, while sustained write bandwidth … Read more

Memory chipmakers, the hardest-hit of the silicon suppliers, this week faced bankruptcy, layoffs, and bleak prospects.

Micron Technology kicked things off by announcing that it would cut as many as 2,000 jobs. Micron and other memory chip manufacturers are all singing the same sad song: slumping revenues amid a steep downward price spiral.

The largest U.S. maker of memory chips said decreased demand for specialty DRAM products had "created additional challenges" for its Boise, Idaho, manufacturing operations. As a result, Micron said it will phase out 200-millimeter wafer manufacturing operations at the company's Boise facility. … Read more

Intel CEO Paul Otellini commented on competition with Nvidia, the economy, and the possible fate of its flash memory factories on Wednesday at a tech conference in San Francisco.

Otellini began by speaking to the fact that the global economic downturn has depleted inventories of chips. "I don't think there's much inventory out there. It's hard to imagine that there's a significant drop below this." He made his remarks at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference 2009, which was streamed live.

And moving quickly to the next generation of chip technology is critical … Read more

What does Steve Wozniak know about solid-state drives that we don't? David Flynn, the chief technology officer of SSD start-up Fusion-io, provides some insight into why the Apple co-founder is joining the company as chief scientist.

I talked with Flynn on the phone about what the Salt Lake City start-up, founded in 2006, does and what attracted Wozniak.

Enterprise solid-state drives typically offer much better performance than even the fastest hard-disk drives. Fusion-io claims that its IoDrive improves storage performance by as much as 1,000 times over traditional disk arrays while operating at a fraction of the power … Read more

Micron Technology is cutting as many as 2,000 more jobs because of slumping demand for its products, as the shakeout in the memory chip business continues.

The largest U.S. maker of memory chips said Monday afternoon that decreased demand for specialty DRAM products has "created additional challenges" for its Boise, Idaho, manufacturing operations. As a result, Micron said it will phase out 200 millimeter (mm) wafer manufacturing operations at the company's Boise facility.

"This action will reduce employment at Micron's Idaho sites by approximately 500 employees in the near term and as many … Read more

After a technology review site claimed Intel solid-state drives slow considerably after extended use, Intel said it has not been able to duplicate the results.

SSDs have been gaining in popularity because independent testing done to date has typically shown that SSDs--especially the newest generation of drives--outpeform hard disk drives.

A review, however, entitled "Long-term performance analysis of Intel Mainstream SSDs" on technology Web site PC Perspectives claimed, among other things, that the Intel X25-M solid-state drive may degrade in performance as a result of "internal fragmentation" and that "a 'used' X25-M will always perform … Read more