High-performance storage solutions vendor Fusion-io may have gone way ahead of setting a record, when during the Storage Networking World event, the company demonstrated its 640 GB PCI-Express ioSAN card to support as many as 768 simultaneous DVD-quality video streams. To do so, the engineers set up a storage network consisting of a host workstation for the ioSAN card, 12 disk-less servers with quad-socket, quad-core processors, using an InfiniBand backbone, two 10 gigabit Ethernet switches, and NVIDIA graphics cards to provide the video acceleration. The resulting display consisted of about a dozen 50-inch HD LCD TVs running to form a compound display panel, onto which the 768 video streams were played on.

Joshua Aune, Fusion-io systems architect, says that the ioSAN card could have stored 2,500 DVD-quality movies, and will further be able to support 1,024 video streams, which the company plans to demo in two weeks time at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show, in Las Vegas USA. The ioSAN 320GB PCIe card boasts a 1.5GB/sec. read speed and 1.4GB/sec. write speed with 32k packets or 186,000 IOPS for reads and 167,000 IOPS for writes using 4k packets. The card used in this feat had 640GB of single-layer cell (SLC) NAND flash memory in two 320 GB modules. A video of the feat can be watched here.