Fusion-io has announced a new high-performance series of accelerators

Former Hewlett-Packard technology chief Shane Robison was hired last year to help reboot operations at Fusion-io, a pioneer in bringing smartphone-style data storage to computer rooms. Now he’s putting a stamp on its product line. The Salt Lake City company is hosting an event in San Francisco Wednesday to announce its next jump in technology, a piece of hardware called Atomic that is aided by a new generation of the widely used chips known as flash memory. Such solid-state data storage lets users fetch data much more quickly than the disk drives that have long been used to store most corporate data, while using much less energy and avoiding the risk of mechanical failures. Those are the reasons flash chips are the norm in smartphones, and are quickly being added to the server systems of big consumer websites and other customers that care about performance. Fusion-io is best known for circuit boards that plug directly into servers, while some other companies sell devices called solid-state drives that look more like disk drives and fit into their sockets.