Q&A: Why Apple's Co-Founder is Hot on Solid State Storage
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak accepted a position as chief scientist at solid state drive company Fusion-io earlier this year. Wozniak says he took the job because the company is so much like Apple was in its early days and he sees a huge market for solid state storage on PCIe cards.
Tue, October 13, 2009
Computerworld — Earlier this year, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak accepted the position of chief scientist at start-up solid state drive company Fusion-io. It's the first time since 1972, when he worked in Hewlett-Packard Co's calculator division, that he's held a technologist's position for a company that wasn't his own.
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Unlike many other solid state vendors, Fusion-io doesn't manufacture a NAND flash drive product in a 2.5-in. or 3.5-in hard drive form factor. The company makes PCIe cards with up to 640GB of capacity and 1.6GB/sec. throughput that can be inserted directly into servers, greatly increasing performance for I/O-intensive applications while also shrinking space requirements when compared to high-end hard disk drives.
Since joining the company, Wozniak hasn't widely discussed why he chose to become a member of Fusion-io's advisory board and then its chief scientist. Computerworld spoke to him about that choice and what he sees as the future of solid state storage technology. The following are excerpts from that interview.
Becoming a member of any company's board that you didn't help create seems uncharacteristic of you, so why did you join Fusion-io's? I joined because I saw a remarkable vision, but more than the product vision, I saw the people who created the vision. Their overall design methodologies lead to good clean products. That's what I saw in these people. I really expected to be invited to join the advisory board, but I sort of got a position in the company, which was exciting because by then I was so sold on the company.
And, I'm sort of a purest. I like things with electrons moving instead of heavy metal parts -- maybe because I didn't grow up as a mechanical person. Rather than spinning atoms, I like to get down to electrons, and who knows, maybe in the future it will be photons.
You've never really been a storage guy. What attracted you to this technology? Well, I was a storage guy really early - in floppy disks. I don't come from the heavy-duty storage area where you've got RAID arrays and fiber optic channels. But, actually, the way I approached even designing my floppy disk structures was to take out a lot of middle man technology that wasn't needed - to look at the overall problem and get from the start to the finish in one quick jump. And, I saw those same principles had been applied in designing [Fusion-io's] product.
