In their ongoing coverage of Oracle Open World 2013, John Furrier and Dave Vellante spoke with Lee Caswell, Fusion-io VP of Virtualiation Product Group. The three discuss the importance of fast and consistent performance and end with a game of technology word association that leads Caswell to boast to his competition: “Bring it.”

As the field is so pre-occupied with Flash, Vellante argues that real task is to enhance the business value of applications. Caswell agrees, noting that customers are primarily concerned with speed because it enhances the bottom line. Whereas a disk delivers maybe 150 iOPS, Flash may deliver 10 times that. To keep up, Fusion-IO is “covering the whole breadth of the product portfolio now.”

Vellante asks about virtualization, specifically in terms of Oracle environments. Oracle has a track record of servicing customers with virtualization very well. Caswell considers this service crucial because, if “I can virtualize, all of a sudden I get some pretty nice benefits, particularly maintenance. The hard part in the past has been, if I wanted to virtualize, I’m going to pay more and I’ll get more storage. Now, I can go and basically deploy virtualization on the server and I can get better performance and I can offload the san.”

Virtualization in Oracle environments takes on certain characteristics given that they are heterogeneous by nature. The task for these customers is to support various environments with a common support path. Fusion-io allows customers a common way to deploy Flash across differences.

Watch the full-interview with Lee Caswell, Fusion-io VP of Virtualiation Product Group below:

Caswell notes that 20 percent of Fusion-io customers run VDI. The company has released a new technology called io VDI that offers consistent performance. Caswell says, “It’s not enough to have fast performance, it’s how do I know I’ll have consistent performance across applications. In a cloud environment, that’s what customers are looking for.” He describes these storage solutions as a “very interesting software value add.”

Vellante concludes trying to glean some insight from Caswell as a pioneer in the model with a game of word association. To the phrase “quality of service,” Caswell responds: “Application aware.” He elaborates, “You have to know what the application needs…If you think about cacheing in a server, the storage array doesn’t know anything about it.” To the phrase, “open source,” Caswell responds: “Hyper scale.” He adds, “We have hyper scale customers who are excited about open source and marrying them to our IO products.” To, “competition,” he replies, “Bring it.” He suggests, “We won by saying we’re the fastest all the time. Now the world’s a little different because everyone can say we may be faster in this one little case.” Still, Caswell argues that Fusion-io customers are willing to pay extra not only for the speed, but precision that their solutions provide in identifying challenges and exploitable opportunities.

Furrier adds, “At the end of the day, the applications matter in the software defined world we live in and that’s being powered by [Fusion-io].”