Fusion-io, a maker of NAND flash memory cards that enhance the performance of data center servers, announced Tuesday that it plans an initial public offering it hopes can raise $150 million.
The company said it has filed a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io makes specialized NAND flash cards designed to boost the performance of data center servers. The flash cards offer throughput of up to 278,000 I/Os per second and up to 1.28TB of capacity.
Most NAND flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) shipping today mimic hard drives in form factor and serial ATA connectivity. On the other hand, Fusion-io's ioDrive consists of NAND flash and a controller on a PCI Express (PCIe) expansion card. The PCIe technology offers throughput of up to 128Gbit/sec throughput, while SATA tops out at 6Gbit/sec today.
Dell and Samsung, the world's leading supplier of NAND flash chips, are major investors in Fusion-io , which has has raised about $115.5 million in three rounds of private funding.
The company stated in its IPO filing that it had shipped more than 20 petabytes of flash-based memory to date.
Fusion-io competes with Violin Memory , Israeli start-up Anobit Technologies and Xiotech Corp. in offering SSD or flash cards that accelerate server performance.
Fusion-io declined comment on its IPO bid.
The number of shares to be offered and the price range have not yet been determined. Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Morgan Stanley & Co. are acting as lead active joint book-runners for the proposed offering, and J.P. Morgan Securities and Credit Suisse Securities are acting as passive joint book-runners.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian , or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com .
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