Flash storage giant Fusion-io has been releasing case studies covering various companies’ use of its ioDrive solutions on a fairly regular basis lately, many hailing from the gaming sector. The newest comes from Drecom, a Japanese web portal that maintains social games, in addition to mobile sites and other things such as RSS readers. The firm Fusion-io’d its database environment.

‘”We needed a solution that would allow us to enhance our MySQL environment to serve our rapidly-growing user base,” said Drecom IT Architect Senior Engineer Yusuke Saito. “No one wants to wait when they log on to play a game. With Fusion ioDrives integrated into our servers, players won’t see ‘server busy’ messages. Now, even millions of players can be sure to enjoy the user experience they expect online.”

About seven months ago another Japanese social media and gaming site operator, CyberAgent, decided to go with Fusion-io as well. The latter released a more detailed case study that looked into how CuberAgent has deployed the technology and its comparison with competing offerings, among other things.

More recently, Host Europe GmbH selected the company’s flash solutions to power its own database. The release went out earlier this month. Host Europe serves a large user base just like its peers – roughly a million – and provides yet another example of flash meeting big data. The growing amounts of unstructured data, the type produced by social interactions and in-game activities, is becoming an increasingly important asset for the enterprise and a bigger and bigger burden on IT infrastructure at the same time.

There’s a need to find better analytics tools but also better equipment designed to handle modern workloads, and Fusion-io built its success on this trend.