Wozniak gets Jobs

APPLE CO-FOUNDER, Steve Wozniak, has landed himself a day job at start-up firm Fusion-io, a firm which fiddles about with flash drives to fine tune computers.

Wozniak, well known in the Valley for his creative engineering skills, apparently felt bored sitting at home jobs-less all day, so when three-year-old Fusion-io, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, came a-knocking, it proved an offer Woz was not about to refuse.

Already a member of Fusion-io's advisory board, Wozniak is about to become the firm's chief scientist, too. Which will involve a fair amount of twiddling a screwdriver in efforts to get computers to tap vast amounts of storage quicker.

Fusion-io uses high-speed flash memory chips, packed tightly together, to form a module which it then slips into servers. This lets the main computing chip get easy access to data on the flash chips, which is oodles quicker than having to hunt around for it on separate storage systems.

It's relatively cheap too, with $10,000 Fusion-io modules purportedly handling the same workloads as $100,000 EMC or NetApp storage systems.

Fusion-io already boasts over 300 customers, including Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah. It has also managed to pull in investment from Dell and had sales arrangements with Dell, HP and IBM. µ

L'Inq
New York Times