With over 1000 attendees at this year’s #PerconaLive event in Santa Clara, CA, the open source community has shown that there is still a strong interest in and demand for the MySQL platform. SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE broadcast team covered many perspectives from professionals across the entire spectrum. John Furrier and Jeff Frick welcomed Nisha Talagala, Lead Architect with Fusion-io. As a means of disclosure, it should be noted Fusion-io was theCube broadcast sponsor for this week’s event.

Kicking off the conversation, Furrier noted how the Software-defined data center really seems as though it has been coming into its own over the past couple of years with Fusion-io, and Flash specifically, benefitting from its uptick in popularity.

“I think the transformation of the data center through Flash over the past few years has already been substantial,” noted Talagala. “But it is still in the beginning of this particular journey.” As it pertains to the MySQL data base, Flash has enabled the platform to adapt to both speed and latency. “What we announced yesterday with all of our partners was what we consider to be the next wave of optimization and enhancements for databases with Flash,” continued Talagala. “And that is what we call ‘Flash Awareness’.” Flash Awareness is, according to Talagala, the recognition that you are working with a brand new medium. Flash, as a medium, is becoming a staple in the data center.

Watch the interview in its entirety here:

Early on in the era of compute, disk storage presented limitations that had to be overcome because there simply were no other options. “[Developers created] a lot of technology to deal with the limitations. Flash doesn’t have those limitations,” she stated. “There is so much more parallelism now. How do you make use of it? Do you write software that is simpler, more scalable and makes the best use of underlying Flash,” she asks. Where once developers had to devote time and resources to working around spinning disk limitations, they now can focus their efforts squarely on creating innovative new applications. “Flash is faster. And looking down the line, it’s only going to improve,” asserted Talagala. “The line between DRAM and disk was distinct. The line between DRAM and Flash is very blurry.”

Mentioned above, Flash Awareness is the second phase of, according to Talagala, Flash evolution. The time developers have been able to devote to innovative new applications was part of the first phase, called ‘Flash as Disk’. “It is a really, really fast disk,” she stated. “You can see apps running many degrees faster and delivering more transactions per dollar, per watt which is the most important thing.” Increased speed and efficiency of Flash has been seen over the past few years and that has led to the observed widespread adoption. Now that people are experiencing Flash Awareness, via application or file system adaptation, even if they are running legacy applications on an optimized file system they will experience the benefit.

“The transition into much more of a memory oriented world is the third phase,” Talagala said. “That step is imminent in the next few years.” She cited Fusion-io’s introduction of enhancements to the Linux kernel aimed at improving virtual memory as proof the third phase has already begun. “What that does is it changes the virtual memory system so applications can think they have a lot of memory,” she claimed. “But what they really have is a tier of DRAM and Flash. So, it’s already happening.”

Talagala believes the future of MySQL is advancing organically thanks to companies like Facebook learning from their practical deployments of the platform at very large scale. She states the upcoming trend as she sees it is the convergence of both memory and storage into memory databases. “The classic world of analytics over here and transactions over here and they don’t meet was, in some sense, created out of necessity,” she stated. “You couldn’t put them together. It just wouldn’t work. But now, with these faster technologies, you can have your analytics and your transactions be up to the minute. People are responding very much to that.”

Going forward, Talagala claims the quest for efficiency and scale is a task that is never ending at Fusion-io and in the Flash world. “Particularly when you are deploying things at massive scales, even small inefficiencies in a single node translate into millions of dollars of operating expenses,” she said. “Most people, the money they make is between the price of the service they offer and what does it cost to run the service. The quest to increase efficiency is ongoing. It’s still a challenge.”

Wrapping up the interview, Furrier asked Talagala to provide insight into her company on both the product and execution standpoint. “I think the Fusion-io product portfolio has expanded very substantially over the past few years. We were very successful with the PCI Flash devices,” she stated. “That is where we established the market and that is still a significant part of our business.” Talagala highlighted their newer cacheing products and their jump into the BDI space as well as commenting on their ION Accelerator aimed at higher-end users employing an all-flash solution. “We continue to expand our portfolio and focus on application acceleration at all levels.”

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