Founded in 2006, Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io (fusionio.com) ran under the radar until exploding onto the scene last September by unveiling its ioDrive at the DEMOfall 07 conference. DEMO has long been the launching pad for hot high-tech software, services and products such as Palm, Skype, TiVo, Leapfrog, Java and Slingbox.

The Product: ioDrive
Targeted to large companies or highly trafficked Web sites needing the fastest ways to get data in and out of a server, the ioDrive stands alone in its speed, size, power consumption and low cost. Best of all for Fusion-io, it’s patentable.

The need: If a company needs to post a large amount of documents or huge files to many users, serving the data from a regular hard drive (like the one in your PC) doesn’t cut it. The limited input/output speed on traditional mechanical hard drives can only be so fast since they rely on physical heads moving around on spinning hard disks to read and write data.

The solution: The ioDrive has the speed of 1,000 hard drives, not the storage capacity of 1,000 hard drives. The key word here is “speed,” and the ioDrive certainly delivers. The ioDrive can serve up roughly 100,000 pages of text per second or transfer an entire DVD’s worth of video in about five seconds.

The coolness factor: Before the ioDrive, large organizations turned to an enterprise-class Storage Area Network (SAN) to obtain desired input/output speeds. A SAN with 1,000 hard drives is about the same size as a large refrigerator. In contrast, the ioDrive fits in your pocket, barely uses any power and doesn’t require regular maintenance.

The companies that listened: The ioDrive, which began shipping in April, is being used by more than 70 Fortune 500 companies.