Facebook has stated in the past that it would move all of its archival data to all-flash storage, as users expect to be able to access
long-dormant content (such as old photographs and video) instantaneously. We note that Facebook initially used Fusion IO?s ioScale product in 2013, which was priced at $3.98/GB. We believe that the
first customer of the Infiniflash will be Facebook, as it continues to store data on flash storage, although we expect SanDisk to target other hyperscale customers with the technology.
The product appears to be a new improved avatar of Fusion-IO?s all-flash storage appliance ? the ioN accelerator. While the FIO product was targeted at high-performance use cases like all other all-flash arrays, SNDK appears to have targeted the product at secondary-storage use cases such as data repositories, big-data analytics and media streaming.
SanDisk appears to have made a strong software push with this product. Key enhancements that SNDK has made to the erstwhile FIO product include several key software-based features such as scale-out (10-100s of nodes), block, file and object protocol support, enterprise class reliability (hot swappable modules) and data protection (snapshots, etc).
