Brent Compton Senior Director of product management of Fusion-io dropped by theCube at Oracle Open World 2012 for a discussion about some of the great features of Fusion-io.   The discussion revolved around Fusion-io’s advantages in performance, and what that means to developers.

Compton states that with Fusion-io technology, developers are able to gain access to flash as a nonvolatile memory form and significantly accelerate their applications.  Developers no longer have to contend with latency, taking logic inside the software layer that is actually a database that makes flash go fast.  For the first time in history, developers have native access to open up those primitives and these nonvolatile memory capabilities have the potential to transform software development.    For the short term, the name of the game is making apps go really fast.  Long term, the idea is to change the game and unleashing from what was once manipulation of data structure to memory, not having to convert to old-fashioned I/O – in other words, re-engineering development to use a new data model.  Dealing with I/O cost has long been an encumbrance in development with the opportunity now is to have Fusion-io acting as the industry’s first crack as opening up flash as a nonvolatile memory tier.

An explosion of unstructured data companies have come onto the scene and are gravitating toward these technologies.  This is because classic relational database won’t scale for the most demanding use cases.  The technologies that are meeting these needs were all invented because the classic database on SAN model was tapped out and unable to meet needs.

Fusion-io is delivering answers like no other to a number of issues, including one interesting scenario where SSD utilized as a classic device alone causes dramatic over-provisioning.  Some scenarios would see vendors asking customers to purchase 3 times the amount of flash they need, with 1/3 for data, 1/3 for the grooming required for the underlying flash device, and 1/3 required for garbage collection and defragmentation.  Fusion-io’s non-volatile features helps eliminate this condition.

On competition, Fusion-io has been a pioneer in this space.  After doing some major evangelism, there has been a validation of their strategy from competitors that are doing similar things now.  Fusion-io is a couple of years ahead of that as they have tuned and mastered the flash on server throughout this phenomenal growth.  With Fusion-io and Oracle, a synergistic formula is created that produces fast performance, the bottom line in datacenter performance.