SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced it has completed the previously announced acquisition of Fusion-io, a leading developer of flash-based PCIe hardware and software solutions that enhance application performance in enterprise and hyperscale datacenters. "I am delighted to welcome the employees of Fusion-io to SanDisk. The tremendous engineering and go-to-market talent of the Fusion-io team will accelerate our efforts to enable the flash-transformed data center," said Sanjay Mehrotra, president and chief executive officer of SanDisk. "Together we will offer our customers the broadest set of enterprise flash solutions in the industry."

Under the terms of the agreement, SanDisk completed the acquisition for $11.25 per share for the outstanding shares of Fusion-io, and assumed unvested, in-the-money equity awards, for a total aggregate value of approximately $1.1 billion, net of cash assumed. SanDisk's third quarter financial results will include the results of Fusion-io from July 23, 2014 through September 28, 2014. SanDisk expects to exclusively use non-captive memory for the Fusion-io business for at least the next several quarters.

Fusion IO is known for its NAND flash based storage solutions in the form of expansion cards with dedicated controllers. They've now come up with an IO-SAN card that offers transfers at a stellar 1.5 GB/s. The device can hold 340 GB of data which is roughly a third of a tera-byte. The capacity can be doubled with an add-on card.

Fusion IO claims the IO-SAN card can turn any off-the-shelf server into a full-bore storage area network. The card is installed on a PCI Express slot and has the flash memory right on the card. Fusion IO claims the card can perform up to 200,000 IOPS, with which they seem to have worked out the "power of 4000 hard drives" figure. The card also houses a conventional storage controller so hard drives could be connected. It also has a network controller for 10 GigE or 40 Gb/s InfiniBand.

Following Intel and its partners working extensively on solid-state storage technology, IBM's research staff at the IBM Hursley development lab in England and the Almaden Research Center in California, USA, have demonstrated performance results that outperform the world's fastest disk storage solution by more than 250%, according to the company.

Titled Project Quicksilver, an effort in which IBM coupled solid-state drives with its storage virtualization technology to achieve a sustained data transfer rate of more than 1 million input/output per second (IOPS), with a response time of less than one millisecond in a 4.1-terabyte rack of SSD storage. SSDs are being supplied by Fusion-IO.

"It's feasible that we could get it commercialized within 12 months," said Charlie Andrews, director of product marketing for IBM systems storage. "Right now we have a screaming (fast) system, but there's more work to be done in terms of long-term reliability and integration with systems applications. We don't want to get distracted with 'push the hardware.' We want to focus on the solution piece first," he added.