Flash storage vendor Fusion-io reported its earnings for its fourth fiscal quarter this week, beating the market’s revenue estimates while not falling short in other metrics either.

Fusion reported sales of $106.6 million, a 49 percent increase from the $71. 7 million it disclosed for the same period last year.  Revenue was considerably higher than the FactSet consensus estimate of $96 million.

Chief executive David Flynn took the opportunity to elaborate on this feat during the call, saying,

“On a fiscal year basis, we delivered 82% revenue growth. This significantly outperformed what was already a robust growth expectation of approximately 40% for the industry in general, indicating that we increased our market share lead substantially. We attribute this to the compelling ROI of our solutions and our differentiation both in technology and our go-to-market strategy.”

In Q4 the company lost $2.4 million, or 3 cents a share, in line with analysts’ expectations. In the fourth quarter of 2011 Fusion-io made $5.8 million or 6 cents a share, while operating margin was 12 percent.  Net income rose by 130 percent in 2012 and Fusion-io increased its workforce by 50 percent, Flynn added.

Fusion-io’s stellar performance in Q4 propelled the company’s stock up almost 30 percent to $27.14.

The vendor is keeping its bottom line in check, while also investing a great deal in R&D. This year Fusion-io launched the second generation of its ioDrive PCIe flash device, and more recently introduced software that significantly extends the capabilities of this hardware.

Fusion ION is a platform that runs on ioDrive and can transform two or more into a SAN that can be used to better distribute resources across the data center. And because this process is done directly, customers can afford not to purchase new networking equipment to handle this task.