MySpace racks up energy savings from Fusion-io

MySpace.com users won’t notice the technology differences as they update their profiles, chat with friends and browse photos.

But the Los Angeles-based social portal is greening its operations because of Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io.

Fusion-io’s founder and Chief Technology Officer David Flynn told the Cleantech Group his company’s solid-state storage technology could not only be on its way to becoming an industry standard, but Fusion-io also disclosed MySpace, a division of News Corp. (Nasdaq:NWS), as one of its high-profile clients for the first time today.

MySpace Vice President of Systems Engineering Richard Buckingham said Fusion-io is helping to dramatically reduce his company's carbon footprint and power consumed by its data center operations, where Fusion-io’s technology has been deployed for the last year.

“It’s a massive success story for us,” Buckingham said. “Here is a site, MySpace, that is spending a lot of money on hardware, pretty much the way everyone else is doing it. But with Fusion-io, all of a sudden here’s a way we can do it a lot cheaper, and it really works.”

It is a success story that’s two-sided. Fusion-io has seen 80 percent quarter-on-quarter growth over the past couple quarters, Flynn said.

Customers, such as IBM’s data centers, have been able to half their power consumption and cooling requirements, while requiring only 20 percent of the floor space for hardware. This was through IBM’s Project Quicksilver, which combined Fusion-io’s branded ioDrive drive with IBM’s storage virtualization technology.

“The green nature of this is really a fortuitous happenstance,” Flynn said. “We weren’t founded as a green company.”

Fusion-io specializes solid-state storage technology, meaning no moving parts, and high performance input/output solutions.

But to understand the company’s technology, it helps to understand the origins of data center storage, which has traditionally used hard disk drives (HDD). HDDs involve spinning magnetic plates that run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and are considered major energy consumers.

“Google is using thousands of these things,” said Gartner Research Director Joseph Unsworth.

About five years ago flash-based storage was developed, which uses flash memory such as that in a USB (Universal Serial Bus) stick, offering 20 times the density and lower power requirements, Flynn said, but coming with a higher up-front cost.

However, Unsworth said flash technology offers a strong return on investment in the long-term because of the operating efficiencies it provides and green implications.

In 2007, total data center power and electricity consumption for the world was estimated to cost $7.2 billion annually (see Data centers: $7B in annual energy costs).

Gartner has projected more than 50 percent of data centers will exceed 6 kilowatts per server rack within two years. And that number is expected to rise 70 percent to 80 percent within four years.

Fusion-io has developed what it thinks is a higher level of solid-state storage technology, making flash the centerpiece and integrating it differently with PCI Express, a computer expansion card, or the internal equivalent of USB, compared to others in the space. The Fusion-io device plugs into a different place in the computer, Buckingham said.

“You are saving power by having a storage device that can do what it used to take hundreds of drives to do,” Flynn said.

The company came out of stealth 3.5 years ago and has raised more than $70 million in two venture capital rounds. Its investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Dell Ventures and Sumitomo Ventures.

Fusion-io says its patent-protected technology closes the gap between processing power and traditional storage, offering a new type of application centric storage for database, application and system administrators.

The company has also attracted the attention of Apple’s founder Steve Wozniak, who serves as Fusion-io’s chief scientist.

Players such as Intel (Nasdaq:INTC), STEC (Nasdaq:STEC) and others in the solid-state business are recognizing the importance of and moving toward the form factor, Flynn said. Intel is also already backing numerous clean technologies (see Intel puts more cash into cleantech and Intel Inside solar cells: mixed bag?).

Unsworth said data storage pioneer and hard disk drive company Western Digital recently purchased a PCI Express company and Seagate is also looking at the technology.

“It’s going to get fun,” Flynn said.

There are plenty of other companies looking to add their technologies in the mix. Milpitas, Calif.-based Pliant Technology developed a hybrid approach, combining HDDs with the company’s enterprise flash drives to reduce energy use in storage and IT systems (see Pliant’s new flash drive line aims to cut energy costs 80%).

And Milpitas, Calif.-based Adaptec (Nasdaq:ADPT) is developing flash memory technology powered by a supercapacitor, which could eliminate lithium-ion batteries currently used in data centers (see Adaptec’s new controller bids goodbye to Li-ion batteries).

Unsworth said it could be an “uphill battle” for Fusion-io because it’s going up against big storage companies such as NetApp (Nasdaq:NTAP) and EMC (NYSE:EMC). He said Fusion-io does have support from big server companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell (Nasdaq:DELL) and IBM.

“Fusion-io is really the only credible player,” said Unsworth, although he said it’s difficult to predict whether Fusion-io will remain the dominant player.

Fusion-io has been selling its products over the last six quarters, which range per unit from $3,000 to $12,000 at list price, depending on the size, performance and how long they last. The company is quickly approaching 1,000 global customers, many of which are undisclosed because they view the technology as a strategic advantage, Flynn said.

MySpace is no exception. It has experienced 10-1 reductions to its server footprint in certain areas, Buckingham said. The company’s data center operations, housed in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Virginia, use a combined total of about 4.5 megawatts of power.

MySpace has invested “hundreds of thousands” in Fusion-io’s technology, Buckingham said, without disclosing specifics.

He estimated MySpace spends about $20 a month per server for power, and in some instances has reduced its footprint by 500 servers, which equates to $10,000 a month in power savings or $120,000 a year.

“As the technology matures and density increases, there will be more areas in the company that we can use the technology,” said Buckingham, adding that “the low hanging fruit has already been achieved.”

Unsworth said Fusion-io had $12.5 million in revenue last year by his calculations.

Flynn said the 200-employee company is debating raising another round, and also plans to announce another strategic investor soon. Flynn wants to build a self-standing company, supplying to original equipment manufacturers, and is not looking for buyers.