Apple and Facebook Flash Forward to Computer Memory of the Future

By Cade Metz

03.14.13

6:30 AM

A bird’s eye view of Apple’s data center in Maiden, North Carolina. Photo: Wired/Garrett Fisher

If you hire a plane, you can fly over the massive data center Apple operates in the woodlands of North Carolina, snapping some distant photos of the 500,000-square-foot facility that drives the company’s iCloud web services. And if you’re on foot, you can get a little closer. You might even sneak a peek at the solar farm or the biogas plant that helps power this internet engine room. But Apple won’t let you inside the building — and it won’t tell you what you might find there.

It would be nice to know. Like Google and Amazon, Apple delivers web services to hundreds of millions of people across the globe — at last count, iCloud served over 250 million souls — and that requires a whole new breed of hardware and software, stuff that’s far more efficient than the gear inside most data centers. You can think of this as the technology of tomorrow. As the web continues to grow, the tech used by the Apples and the Googles will trickle down to the rest of the world. In many cases, it already has.

“The internet giants are the harbinger,” says David Floyer, a longtime analyst in the data center world who now runs a tech research house called Wikibon.

What we do know is that Apple is spending mountains of money on a new breed of hardware device from a company called Fusion-io. As a public company, Fusion-io is required to disclose information about customers that account for an usually large portion of its revenue, and with its latest annual report, the Salt Lake City outfit reveals that in 2012, at least 25 percent of its revenue — $89.8 million — came from Apple. That’s just one figure, from just one company. But it serves as a sign post, showing you where the modern data center is headed.

‘There’s now a blurring between the storage world and the memory world. People have been enlightened by Fusion-io.’

— Gary Gentry

Inside a data center like the one Apple operates in Maiden, North Carolina, you’ll find thousands of computer servers. Fusion-io makes a slim card that slots inside these machines, and it’s packed with hundreds of gigabytes of flash memory, the same stuff that holds all the software and the data on your smartphone. You can think of this card as a much-needed replacement for the good old-fashioned hard disk that typically sits inside a server. Much like a hard disk, it stores information. But it doesn’t have any moving parts, which means it’s generally more reliable. It consumes less power. And it lets you read and write data far more quickly.

But that’s only one way to think about it. The same card can also act like a beefed-up version of a server’s main memory subsystem — the place where the central processor temporarily caches data it needs quick access to. You see, today’s super-fast processors have outstripped not only the hard disk, but main memory — the hard disk is too slow, the memory too small — and with its flash cards, Fusion-io aims to remove both bottlenecks.

“You can make it look like traditional storage if you want to, but it can also give you the appearance of more memory inside a system,” says Fusion-io CEO David Flynn, the engineer who founded the company in 2006, alongside a serial entrepreneur named Rick White. “We called it Fusion-io because it was a fusion of memory and storage. They weren’t two separate things.”

The end result is that an outfit like Apple can more efficiently handle all the requests streaming into its data center from across the internet. It can deliver data faster, and it can do so with fewer servers — something that’s vitally important when you’re running such an enormous operation. That’s why Apple is spending so much with Fusion-io — and it’s why many others are moving in the same direction. In 2012, Facebook spent even more with the flash outfit than Apple did: $107.79 million. All told, the two internet giants have spent nearly a half billion dollars with Fusion-io over the years, and smaller but growing operations like Salesforce.com are using these cards as well.

Fusion-io has been so successful inside these massive data centers, it has spawned an army of imitators. Just last week, tech giant EMC uncloaked a new set of flash cards along the same lines, as did Silicon Valley startup Violin Memory. Another startup, Virident Systems, is building similar cards, and Seagate will soon start hawking these Virident cards to big-name web operations and other businesses. Yes, Seagate, one of the world’s biggest hard drive makers.

A Fusion-io flash card. Image: Fusion-io

Seagate already sells hard disks directly to the big name web players — including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — and it will continue to do so. But it sees where the data center is moving. “There’s now a blurring between the storage world and the memory world,” says Gary Gentry, who oversees the new flash hardware operation at Seagate. “People have been enlightened by Fusion-io.”

The trend is driven by more than just one company. Google also uses flash inside its servers — as we heard last summer from Urs Hölzle, the man who oversees Google’s worldwide network of data centers — and according to Silicon Valley scuttlebutt, the search giant builds its own flash cards that look somewhat like Fusion-io devices. Microsoft tells us it’s using similar cards in its data centers, and it very much sees flash as the future of server memory.

Kushagra Vaid, Microsoft’s general manger of server engineering, points out that flash can further revamp the server memory subsystem because it’s non-volatile, meaning that when you power off or reboot the server, it doesn’t lose its data. Standard memory does. As researchers explore other options for overhauling server memory, Vaid says “the innovation happening on the non-volatile memory front” is the most interesting of possibilities.

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