One of the more interesting interviews from last month’s Strata event, for me personally, was when Brian Bulkowski, CTO of Aerospike joined theCube hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante to talk Flash. In-Memory databases are here to stay, even filling into its own market. In the interview, Bulkowski discusses how software-led is the next maturation of a lot of cloud technologies.

The flash layer of in-memory is booming right now. The biggest change in flash and SSD that Aerospike is seeing with its customers in the last 6 months is price and density. On the density side, its largest customers are doubling, sometimes quadrupling the size of each and every node. 500gb of flash per node, are now becoming 1-4 terabyte architectures. Going from 40 node clusters to 4 node clusters. Big advertising use cases pushing Big Real Time Data (BRTD). And price? $1-$1.50 per gigabyte compared to $30 per gigabyte of RAM. That’s a 30x price performance difference.

Additionally exciting for flash is that it doesn’t have to be slower anymore. Before, at 10,000 transactions per second per sever flash was the bottleneck. Now, at 100,000-200,000 transactions per second per server network is back to being the bottleneck. In the last few months, flash has blown past that. The outcome? If you have in-memory and SSD, you might as well use flash. The memory is going to be the bottleneck in either case. Why not save yourself money to the tune of a factor of 30?

SQL shows promise for real-time

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Aerospike is a firm believer in real-time no SQL, too. Bulkowski said that they have a lot of use cases for real-time. Threat detection, insights, patterns, and signatures are all front-side. In the past, you had to have extraordinarily fast key value stores. Nowadays, with NoSQL you can map reduce over more data. This is huge for transactional — network threat detection is faster and equally big for gaming — matchmaking for opponents in game. 5oo milliseconds doesn’t leave a lot of time to run analytics and match algorithms in the ‘right now’. Real-time is replacing batch jobs in these instances.

Software is helping push the real-time ball down the field, and software-led infrastructures and architectures are all about flexibility. Bulkowski sees it as the next step in maturation of a lot of the cloud technologies. What does that mean? “Database company like us flexibly and elastically at capacity,” — nimble is the name of the game for Aerospike. Mixing and matching of softwares/technologies is only a good thing for the customer too. Database as a service opportunity anyone? For the customers it means a more real-time response to different business conditions.

Software-led means new and improved productivity with certain impact on the organization. Aerospike believes that flash will continue to play a vital role in those improvements. Look out for user-defined functions (customizing your database) from Aerospike in 2013. With its gaming and online matchmaking clients, Aerospike aims to bring user-defined functions into the world of flash and SSD.

Oh yea, and metadata is no longer under lock and key.

See Bukowski’s entire segment below.