 Okay, we're back here live in San Francisco, California for Oracle Open World 2012. This is live extended coverage of SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events extracted from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante from wikibond.org. We're here with Brent Compton, who's the senior director of product management at Fusion I.O., who's been on theCUBE a number of times, particularly Dave Flynn and Gary Ornstein. Brent, welcome to theCUBE. I think it's your first time on. It is, thanks for having me. All right, good to see you. Fusion I.O., smoking hot company. We've been hearing a lot about how you're changing the whole infrastructure of the data center, of the enterprise, and we're here at Oracle Open World. This is kind of your sweet spot, right? The world of databases, but so tell us what's new with you guys. What's going on at the event here? Well, if SSDs make databases go fast, when you start looking at flash as a non-volatile memory form, it branches out into an entirely new developers, developers gain access to flash as a non-volatile memory form and can significantly accelerate their applications. Yeah, so we're seeing that, and we've been talking to a number of developers a couple of times in the database world about that. Talk about what developers are doing with that memory extension, bringing non-volatility persistence to the other side of the channel, the right side of the channel of the system architecture. Well, you heard momentarily ago from Brian Bulkowski, from Aerospike. For them, it's all about latency, reducing latency. If they can effectively, if they can take logic, he talked about collapsing a couple different layers. He talked about talking with our founder previously about discovering that inside of our software layer for our virtual storage layer is actually a database that makes flash go fast. And he's building a database as well, so when you combine the two, there's an awful lot of duplicate logic. So what's new and different is giving developers for the first time in industry native access to open up those primitives, which in all SSD vendors today, that's locked. Nobody's exporting primitives for the flash layers. When you think about flash, a lot of people think of flash as an SSD, but when you think instead of flash as a non-volatile memory source, non-volatile memory transforms software development. So that's the long game, is transforming software development. The short game and very, very popular game is making applications go fast with SSDs in addition to that. He talked about the long game being opening up the entries to that system and being able to change the way in which you write applications fundamentally. I mean, think about non-volatile memory. What's native for software developers? What's native to software developers is to manipulate their data structures inside of memory. I remember when I was programming, we had 64K RAM to work with. So imagine a terabyte of memory, in this case, flash, to work with. And one of the things you hated when you program with that 64K of memory is doing I-O, because I-O is foreign, right? I-O takes work. What you love doing is manipulating your data structures inside of memory. But the moment you change, you convert to block I-O, that's work, that's foreign. So think about the future of non-volatile memories when you're able to effectively malloc, I mean, think about allocating 10 terabytes, 100 terabytes of memory. And just within that space, interacting with your data structures natively and knowing that that data is being persisted without having to convert into old-fashioned block I-O onto spinning disk. That non-volatile memory access, that's what's transforming software development. So the software development platform that we're rolling out is the industry's first crack at opening up that flash as a non-volatile memory tier and giving back to what you said before, giving you native access to a lot more non-volatile memory. So one of the keys is obviously getting developers to write to that set of APIs. How's that going? Can you give us an update on the traction that you guys are getting there and what kind of initiatives you have around that? One of the things going on in favor is the explosion of unstructured data vendors, not only unstructured data vendors, but unstructured data applications. So think about all the social networking companies, all the unstructured data tier applications that have been written, just frankly because the classic relational database with the classic SAN just wouldn't scale for those guys. I mean, think about Cassandra, think about Voldemort, think about Big Table, think about Couchbase, think about Mongo. All of those were invented because the classic relational database on SAN just didn't scale, it was tapped out. So folks like that, again, one of the things that's, one of the winds that's blowing in our favor, putting wind in our sails, is the explosion of unstructured data development going on inside of those social networking companies, inside of unstructured data companies, as well as people like one of the things that yesterday I presented here at MySQL Connect. So MySQL itself, classic relational databases, think about if you gave a classic relational database the ability to do an atomic right. So if you, stay with me for a minute on this one here. So think about in the past, when you want to say a group, a whole bunch of blocks do an update, you have to do right ahead logging, or you have to do double buffered rights. So think about instead, if you could take a whole envelope of updates, send it down in a single transaction update to the database, to the media. Number one is you reduce a significantly amount of overhead inside your application, but number two, you double the life of the media because you're writing half as much. So you're talking about double buffered rights and things of that nature too, essentially preserve data integrity, right? Is that right? Give it apps, asset properties. And going through traditional storage protocols to do that, right? What you're chatting. And going through new protocols, new primitives to do that. It's one of the things that, in fact, at one of the presentations, the Percona server guys, gave a present, part of their presentation was talking about how they had converted the MySQL server to convert from instead of doing those double buffered rights, right ahead logging, convert that to atomic rights. So once again, the underlying storage media, so I mean, think about software defined storage. If you can teach the underlying storage media to understand what a transactional update is to get those asset properties, you no longer have to do the workarounds that Database has been doing for generations. All of those things, right ahead logging, double buffered writings, are really, you can consider those as workarounds for the absence of more intelligent storage. Right, okay. Customer environment. Exactly, you guys have grown significantly. Obviously, you went public, we had David Flynn on theCUBE at 2010, I mean, VMworld, when you guys are still private. But now, with all the success you've had, all the expansion capital you've invested in, what's going on in the customer environment? What problems are they now solving as you guys continue to move from caching layer to more and deeper into the infrastructure? What are the key problems that you're seeing pop up consistently for your customers? So actually with unstructured data vendors, I'll stay with the theme of direct access to non-volatile memory. And with some of the unstructured data vendors like Brian's company, one of the things, if you have to treat an SSD like a classic block device because you have no access to its primitives, one of the things that we're seeing from their environment is dramatic over-provisioning. Sometimes in quantities of three X, so several of these no-SQL vendors having to tell their customers to purchase three times the amount of flash that they're actually going to be storing customer data in, effectively one third for the data, one third for the grooming requirements of the underlying flash device, and an additional third for garbage collection and defragmentation from the no-SQL vendor. So one of the things that we're seeing solved by this, again by this new direction of direct access to non-volatile memory is dramatically reducing the amount of over-provisioning that's taking place in the marketplace. That's just a simple example as it relates to the companies you've been speaking to. So I want to talk about the competition a little bit. Around the time that EMC was putting enterprise flash drives into its arrays, you guys were launching, or at least in beta, with your first PCIe card. And then about four years later, at this show last year, EMC announced it was in beta with its VF cache. Now, having said that, big company, a lot of footprint, a lot of feet on the street. How has competition generally affected your marketing, your business, the way in which you're interacting with customers? What's happened is that one of these cases where it's high tide, everybody's happy. Have you had to change the way in which you interact with companies? Because everybody's essentially saying, oh yeah, we do that too. But the nuance of things like atomic rights and all those things that you were just talking about, oftentimes get lost on non-technical people that are influencing the decision. So what has been the impact of all this new competition to you guys? It has enhanced our company. I mean, obviously the results are public being a public company. So as the results indicate, it's enhanced our position in the industry. When you are a pioneer, as you mentioned, that we were four years ago, it's lonely. And you have to do an awful lot of evangelism. People say, what is it you're talking about? Why would you not just keep all of your storage far, far away at the other end of a network fire? It's too expensive. So now it's a validation of the pioneering strategy. So as EMC is recognizing today that when you put data close to where it's needed, good things happen, that was us a couple of years ago. Now when you look at the kinds of things that we're doing, we're now a couple years ahead of that, looking at things like, this is a non-volatile memory mechanism. So we're able, because we mastered Flash on server a couple of years ago, that allows us to do what we're doing now, a couple of years ahead in terms of the next generation of utilization of Flash. And you're hearing it from Oracle. We're at Oracle Open World. I mean, a lot of conversation about Flash. People standing up at the keynotes, talking about the impact of Flash. I think Oracle might have even called you out, which is John says is validation. So, nice. Now when Oracle calls you out publicly, it's complete validation. I mean, there's been some dents in the armors if you will. So congratulations, but that being said, there's a lot of rhetoric being thrown around. So how do you answer that with Oracle? I mean, with Oracle itself, we make Oracle go fast too. Working with some of their companies, of course, like the MySQL group is the one that's public, but a few other ones privately, looking at, for them mostly, looking at, once again, if you can treat this Flash as programmable non-volatile memory, what's possible? Because it's different than just Blockhead. I think, you know, Brian from AeroSpike, who's the co-founder of a previously called Citrus League, I think he's an example of a new breed of company that's rising very, very fast. They have technical chops, solving real problems at scale, with this new capability. So to me, that's, we're going to see a lot more of that. So could you lend some color into that and share other examples like Brian's company that you're seeing, just don't have the name companies, you just show areas of growth, where startups are coming in, you're seeing a lot of activity. Can you share with the folks out there, any areas in particular? In the financial industry, you can only trade as fast as you can log. And so in that space, various types of innovation going on in terms of enterprise message bus, high-speed transaction logging, those types of things. So we're seeing that as a hot pocket of Flash adoption, non-volatile memory adoption as well, kind of a trend of doing things that couldn't be done before. When back to the old adage, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is slow spinning disc, you can't do some of the things. So that's an area where we see a fresh new round of innovation based on new solutions available in the marketplace. Awesome. Government institutions who track us. They have a lot of information which they need to track. Likewise, frequently need to access that data. And so that's another area. Again, it's opening up a new round of innovation, the application space. Yeah, I'm sure the orders are flying in from the government. I mean, with Homeland Security and surveillance and with video cameras accelerating huge amounts of data in real time. It's not going away. I mean, I don't think it's going to go away. More data, the better. So how's David Flynn doing? How's the company? Give us a quick update on Fusion. David is doing swimmingly. In fact, I think you probably, if you've been reading the news, he's been down under. I believe it's in Australia. So continuing to circle the globe. Business is good. Waz was down there giving a little speech too. Is he still on the entourage? Waz? I'm not sure where they are today, but yes, recently they were together down under. Awesome. Okay, well, we're inside theCUBE. We're here with a special edition software to find everything, infrastructure, new architectures, Fusion IO leading the charge. Obviously continuing to set the agenda and just out distance themselves from the old way and pioneer the new way. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. We'll be right back with a wrap up for today and right after this short break.