IO Turbine

IO Turbine, founded in 2009 by Rich Boberg, was a software company that emerged from stealth in April 2011 to address performance bottlenecks in virtualized computing environments. The founding team was composed of executives with extensive experience from technology giants like EMC, NetApp, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. The firm secured $7.75 million in a Series A funding round in April 2011, with investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Merus Capital.

The company's core business centered on developing software to manage and deliver the high-performance input/output (I/O) operations required to make virtualization effective across a growing number of workloads. IO Turbine's main product was the Accelio software, a solution specifically designed to tackle I/O bottlenecks that occur when multiple virtual machines on clustered servers attempt to access shared storage area networks (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS). This software, initially focused on VMware environments, leveraged server-side flash storage to accelerate performance. The business model targeted enterprise clients who were struggling to virtualize data-intensive applications without sacrificing performance.

Just a few months after its public launch, in August 2011, IO Turbine was acquired by Fusion-io, a developer of flash-based PCIe hardware and software, for approximately $95 million. The acquisition was a strategic move for Fusion-io to integrate IO Turbine's caching software with its own ioMemory hardware modules. This combination aimed to create a more comprehensive solution for enterprise data centers, improving the return on investment by increasing the number of virtual machines that could be hosted on a single physical server. Fusion-io itself was later acquired by SanDisk in 2014, which was subsequently bought by Western Digital.

Keywords: IO Turbine, Rich Boberg, storage management solutions, virtualization performance, I/O bottleneck, Accelio software, flash caching software, VMware environments, data center acceleration, Fusion-io acquisition, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Merus Capital, enterprise storage software, server-side flash, virtualized computing, storage area network optimization, NAS optimization, data-intensive applications, high IOPS, virtual flash SSD