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Fusion-io fits Facebook's datacentre, filing suggests

It looks as though Facebook could be stuffing its huge, wholly-owned datacentre in Prineville, Oregon, with ultra-fast flash memory technology.
Written by Jack Clark, Contributor

It looks as though Facebook could be stuffing its huge, wholly-owned datacentre in Prineville, Oregon, with ultra-fast flash memory technology.

According to SEC filings from storage firm Fusion-io, which filed for an IPO on Wednesday, Facebook is currently the company's biggest customer and will continue to account for a "substantial portion of revenue" up until 31 March, "but that revenue from sales to Facebook and the other end-user will decline significantly for the three months ending June 30, 2011, as they complete their planned deployments."

Facebook is in the process of building a 300,000-square-foot datacentre in Prineville, Oregon, to cope with the social network's stellar growth. It expects the datacentre to be partially operational in the first quarter of 2011, with construction finished by early 2012.

Fusion-io makes PCI-e bus-connected flash storage that the company says "dramatically increases bandwidth and application performance, reduces latency, and simplifies your IT infrastructure" along with reducing storage latencies and cutting input/output bottlenecks.

"Many users of our platform have reported achieving greater than 10 times the application throughput per server through increased server utilisation, resulting in reductions to ongoing facility, energy and cooling expense," the company said in its filing.

In other words, Fusion-io's technology dovetails with Facebook's needs, as the 500 million-strong social network looks to build a next-generation datacentre.

But the technology isn't cheap, in 2009 the Fusion-io server add-in board ioDrive went for £2,000.

Fusion-io's two other major customers, listed in its filing, are original equipment manufacturers HP and IBM.

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