As big-time innovators in solid-state storage as it combines with distributed storage models, Fusion-io has been pushing the cloud-envelope on multiple fronts. Since their emergence into the scene as a start-up in 2006, they’ve inducted the Woz as their chief scientist and brought Michael Dell from Dell, Inc. on board as an investor in the company. Now, seeing an expansion in the SSD market, they’re looking to cash in on the boom.

Yet, columnists like Larry Dignan at ZDnet think they’re still a bit too wet behind the ears to be thinking IPO,

For the six months ended Dec. 31, Fusion-io reported a net loss of $8.24 million on revenue of $58.3 million. For the same period a year earlier, Fusion-io reported a net loss of $13.2 million on revenue of $11.93 million.

Those results show a lot of growth, but relative to other tech companies that are planning to go public—Skype, LinkedIn and others—or have already gone Fusion-io looks a little green.

Nevertheless, Fusion-io has all the Wall Street heavy hitters as underwriters: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Credit Suisse.

Over the past year they’ve been sitting in the belly of a lot of big innovation involving SSDs, noting the release of ioSphere and Fusion ioSphere for cloud-storage and -processing management. They even recently joined with SuperMicro this year in breaking the million IOPS barrier. This sort of storage accessibility rests at the crux of what Fusion-io offers to companies that rely on moving large tracts of information to crunch on them and need to be extremely agile with their capability to sift through or digest mountains of data.

And speaking of mountains of data, Fusion-io is coming to market revealing they’ve got a big-bad contender on their side.

Some of the big things from their IPO filing, however, seem pretty promising—such as what ZDnet discovered: Facebook.

Fusion-io depends on big deployments. For instance, Fusion-io said revenue for the three months ending March 31 will include purchases from two customers with significant data center deployments—one of them Facebook. The rub: Revenue for the quarter ending June 30 will be lower than then March quarter. The company said:

“Facebook is currently our largest customer and accounted for a substantial portion of revenue during the six months ended December 31, 2010. We expect revenue from sales to Facebook and one other end-user to account for a substantial portion of revenue for the three months ending March 31, 2011, but that revenue from sales to Facebook and the other end-user will decline significantly for the three months ending June 30, 2011 as they complete their planned deployments.”

Facebook is a huge data-center customer and as long as they’re still highlighting every ounce of drama squeezed out of millions of relationships across the world they’re not going away. In fact, with more and more mobile devices hooking into social media, we’re continuing to see a rise in a need for extremely fast solid-state storage.

Even with Facebook, it’s easy to see that it’s an odd time for Fusion-io to make IPO. The solid-state market currently does look extremely lucrative, but it’ll be a bit of a bumpy ride for them. Perhaps they’re hoping that by filing for IPO they’ll become a juicy target for other corporations looking for rapid-deployment data center applications and see that Facebook (and another end-user) went with Fusion-io and want to jump onto the bandwagon.

If so, that’s seems like a fairly risky gambit; but with the rising tide of interest in SSDs when it pays off, it will pay off big.