Fusion-io had some big news coming out of VMworld, the announcement of ioCache. The new offering is the fruit of a one year-long team up with ioTurbine, a developer of virtualized caching software in acquired only three weeks ago.

Fusion-io CEO David Flynn took the opportunity to dismiss some speculations claiming that his company’s intention was to go public in order to better attract potential buyers: the opposite is true; Fusion needed the capital to complete the acquisition of ioTurbine, according to him.

ioCache combines  Fusion-io’s hardware and ioTurbine’s software to allow customers to leverage  server-attached flash storage as a substitute for RAM  when running data intensive virtual applications, or databases. It also enables Fusion-io to tap the virtualized market for the first time, because its offerings were only designed for non-virtualized environments before.

“ioCache uses ioTurbine technology, which Fusion-io gained in its acquisition of IO Turbine in early August,” ZDNet reports. “The technology provides a method for virtualised environments to federate virtual machines’ storage across Fusion-io flash hardware.”

The company promises that ioCache can reduce overheads and improve I/O performance by  eliminating mapping functions made redundant by Fusion’s VSL and ioTurbine management software. Further, it also optimizes traffic to simplify communications between VMs and the server.

The flash cache market is a fairly small one, but there have been a few interesting developments bubbling up recently that got a few a more eyeballs looking at this area. FlashSoft released SE-V for VMware, a software offering that accelerates performance by enabling enterprise flash to work as server-tier cache. It’s based on the original SE, built for Windows Server.

Bert Latamore highlights Wikibon analyst David Floyer’s thoughts on flash storage yesterday, explaining how Flash’s performance is lined with a lowering price, which makes offerings such as iOCache more and more attractive for the enterprise.