High-speed solid-state drive maker Fusion-io today marked the occasion of getting $47.5 million in extra funding by providing early details about a new storage device. The ioSAN (Storage Area Network) will borrow the same concept of a PCI Express drive with multiple SSDs in a RAID stripe but put it on a local network, theoretically giving the benefits of the extra-quick read and write times as quickly as the network allows. It's unknown if it would use Ethernet or else a faster but more exotic networking method like Fiber Channel.

Shipments for ioSAN, as well as more details, should be available by the summer.

The expansion into network storage takes place just as Fusion-io has signed on former Novell executive David Bradford as its CEO. Besides his experience in networking software, Bradford was also instrumental in bringing Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak into the company as a chief scientist to help guide the storage producer's research.