“The hottest event in San Francisco last night was a birthday party,” Ina Fried reports for AllThingsD. “Why? The birthday boy is Steve Wozniak.”
“Fusion-io, where Woz is chief scientist, planned the party as a surprise for the Apple co-founder at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Guests secretly invited to the museum received pink boas, noise makers and a chance to test their skills on Tetris — a Woz favorite,” Fried reports. “The word from the party is that, despite the social media-happy crowd, it remained a surprise. One drunk tweet or text message supposedly popped up last night, but Woz’s wife deleted it from all of her husband’s many phones and gadgets.”
Check out the photos from Woz’s birthday party here.
“The company won’t just be partying for Woz, but celebrating an important technology advance. And while the press release it has put out doesn’t exactly make it accessible to the layman, it comes down to this: Servers that run in the cloud are going all flash,” Arik Hesseldahl reports for AllThingsD.
“Fusion-io’s stock in trade has from the start been about keeping those impatient processors busy. You put flash memory chips up close to the processor, let them grab a lot of data out of the hard drive and stuff their pockets full of it and then shovel it off by the armload to the processor,” Hesseldahl reports. “More computing work gets done, and in the long run, you get more computing oomph for your dollar, or spend less on computing hardware to get the same level of work done.”
“It’s because of this that companies like Facebook and Apple have loaded the servers in their data centers with Fusion-io’s memory cards. But the flash has always existed in a combined environment. Facebook, for example, treated the flash as a cache, pretty much as I described it above,” Hesseldahl reports. “But now, using this new technology that Fusion is announcing tonight, the boxes in Facebook’s data centers are going all flash… Today’s new product is Fusion’s play to deal its own blow to the established business for storage arrays. It’s called the ION Data Accelerator, and it’s software that the company says can transform any industry standard server into a wicked-fast ‘data acceleration device.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Happy birthday, Woz!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Judge Bork” and “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]