The New York Times is reporting that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is taking an active role in Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io as chief scientist in addition to serving on the company's board.

The company makes flash memory-based storage for servers. The difference is that instead of producing solid state drives, the company uses a NAND clustering technology they dub ioMemory to bridge the gap between the speed of DRAM and the relative capaciousness of flash, providing performance of over 120,000 random read/write IOPS. The firm's ioDrive hardware looks more like a server/PC card than a drive. Naturally, the power savings are substantial.

Here's what may have swayed Wozniak, a technology enthusiast at heart.

Fusion-io says it has more than 300 customers, including Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah. Douglas Babb, the chief IT systems architect at the base, said a $10,000 module from Fusion-io can handle much of the work usually done by storage systems costing more than $100,000 sold by EMC, NetApp and others.

The amount of time it takes for tasks like modeling jet wings or analyzing manufacturing and supply data, Mr. Babb said, can be reduced to just hours or even minutes from days with the Fusion-io technology. “In my opinion, it’s absolutely a game-changing product,” he said.

Of course, the mention of Apple steers any conversation to the topic of Steve Jobs and his medical leave. Wozniak handled it in a classy way, downplaying any potential involvement in the iconic company by saying, "I think I have a better place at smaller companies looking at new ideas."

[via Gizmodo]