NAND Flash-based Technology Effectively Extends RAM Caches for Compositors, Video Editors

If you were at SIGGRAPH last month, you may have wondered just what was up with the mechanical bull-riding contests being run out of the back of the exhibit hall. Turns out that was just Fusion-io trying to get the attention of the VFX-and-animation market. The company makes drives based on solid-state NAND flash memory – a memory technology that's similar to RAM, but non-volatile. It's also a little bit slower than RAM, but it runs cooler and is cheaper, meaning that it can be deployed in much higher quantities, the company says.
Fusion-io’s star case study in the content-creation market is Prime Focus, which has deployed the technology in its 2D-to-3D conversion pipeline, installing 640 GB ioDrive Duos in its workstations and claiming 2x to 4x productivity increases due to increased data load capabilities. “With RAID, there’s still a chance the disk will fail or a controller will go down, and you have to spend two hours with that device offline,” Sean Konrad, the designer of the 3D pipeline at Prime Focus, recently told StudioBytes sister publication Film & Video. “The Fusion-io drives don’t really go down. They just function.” (Read the full F&V story here.)
To a workstation, a Fusion-io drive looks like an ordinary disk drive. “That’s sleight-of-hand in software,” Fusion-io CEO David Flynn told StudioBytes. “It’s not RAM, but it performs like memory. It’s a horizontal solution across application verticals.”

That’s one way to say that content creation isn’t a primary market for the company, but it may be coming up fast. Fusion-io’s big customers are companies like Facebook, MySpace, Thomson/Reuters and DeutscheBank. “These companies have their infrastructure consolidated in big data centers,” Flynn explained. “[Computing] devices are just gateways to get at the information up in the cloud.” In that kind of environment, a company that puts Fusion-io products in a server could conceivably increase that machine’s workload by 10 times. Flynn said.

Fusion-io hopes that kind of leverage will come in handy in the post-production industry. For example, compositors who might currently have 32 GB of memory for their RAM previews can use Fusion-io devices to extend that memory cache. A single card will allow real-time 2K playback, and two cards can handle real-time 4K playback, the company said.

Video editors might use Fusion-io drives as a new tier of storage, perhaps for preview files, in between RAM and conventional disks. The increased throughput could be handy for stereoscopic playback, especially since the drive can be read from and written to simultaneously. And the company said the drives can take advantage of GPU-accelerated architecture, like NVIDIA’s CUDA, by shoveling mountains of data in just as quickly as the graphics hardware can keep up.

The Fusion-io cards also have a data-integrity safeguard that functions like triple-redundant RAID 5, the company said. If one of the memory chips in a card develops too many bad blocks, that chip will be decommissioned and replaced by an extra chip reserved for that purpose, and the user will be warned that the card needs replacement. Sounds like another neat trick in an industry that needs crazy speed but can’t afford to lose a frame.

For more information: www.fusionio.com.