Fusion-io hits the street with a much anticipated initial public offering (IPO), Hitachi GST posts higher hard drive unit sales but lower revenue, Folding@Home’s new BIG work units and ServeTheHome’s second anniversary all made news this week.
Fusion-io’s IPO a Success
On Thursday 9 June 2010 Fusion-io, a company I follow, had its initial public offering on the NYSE. The stock opened higher, had a post IPO dip and is recovering on Friday. One of the most interesting things in the SEC filings was that Fusion-io gets about half its revenue from Facebook. With Facebook’s Open Compute project it is interesting to see that they are using some high-margin proprietary solid state storage caching instead of smaller, lower margin players like OCZ Technology.
Hitachi GST Shipping More Hard Drives for Less
Hitachi GST is still a separate entity while the antitrust authorities look into Western Digital’s proposed acquisition of the hard drive maker. Not all news was good in the Q1’2011 earnings release with revenues down from the year ago quarter by approximately 13% in terms of Yen and 4% in US dollars due to exchange rate fluctuations. Conversely hard drive shipments were up around seven percent compared to the year ago quarter and all segments other than notebook drives (remaining almost flat) posting double digit percentage gains. This shows how much price pressure the traditional rotating disk industry is under because very high year/ year shipping volumes yielded a large revenue decline showing average selling prices (ASPs) are down significantly.
Folding@Home Moves -bigbeta (6903) Work Units into Production
As the home of the unofficial Folding@Home benchmark one interestingly enough Stanford moved the 6903 work unit series into production this week. These large work units require sixteen thread machines meaning that one needs at minimum dual quad core Intel Xeons with Hyper-Threading to run the work units. Lower spec’d machines cannot run these units that carry hefty increases in point production making quad G34 boards such as the Supermicro H8QGi+-F and Tyan S8812 looking particularly attractive. The 6903’s are currently only available to Linux clients.
ServeTheHome.com Celebrates Second Anniversary
On June 8, 2009 ServeTheHome launched making this Thursday the two year anniversary of the site. I just wanted to say thank you again to all the readers, commenters, and forum members for making this site a great resource for those looking to build a home server. There is still a lot of work to do!
Feel free to discuss these and more in the ServeTheHome.com Forums!
