David Flynn, Fusion-io and Rich Boberg, Turbine | VMworld 2011
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2011-09-09

David Flynn, CEO of Fusion-io and Rich Boberg, CEO of IO Turbine joined John Furrier, Founder of SiliconANGLE and Dave Vellante, Co-Founder of Wikibon at VMworld 2011 for a discussion about flash and Fusion-io's acquisition of IO Turbine.

Flynn started out by distinguishing Fusion-io from other flash companies.  He made the comparison that "Everybody uses disk drives, but that doesn't make them EMC and NetApp.  Everybody uses flash, but that doesn't make them Fusion-io."  He said there are very big differences in business models and architectures, how the flash is used, the technical perspective, and customer interaction.  

The real challenge, according to Flynn, isn't just creating the hardware that's capable of housing large quantities of data with very rapid access.  It's how to run a distributed system where the data get diffused to the right server at the right place at the right time.  That's where the acquisition of IO Turbine comes in, because they had a similar vision on how to manage the supply chain of data in a virtualized environment.
Boberg gave a brief background on IO Turbine, recalling how it recognized the need for flash in the virtualized environment.  He said their approach was not to go after the CPU hypervising or the memory hypervising, but the I/O performance issue.  They needed software to bring flash into that server and to address that basic bottleneck in the hypervisor world.  Flynn continued describing IO Turbine's function and how it houses data from multiple origins, virtualizing it the same way the VMware hypervisor manages computational resources and memory resources.  He said, "They have built the paravirtualization infrastructure to capture the I/Os before they even go through the guest operating system, and to tunnel them down into where they can get access through the VSL into the flash, and what this means is that you can actually serve I/Os in a way that bypasses not just most of the ESX Hypervisor I/O stack, but also most of the guest.  It actually captures them even above the file system, so it creates that paravirtualized tunnel for the I/O."

When asked about their goals, Flynn claimed, "We're all about high potency flash."  He said the big question is how to get flash to render the most benefit, especially since it costs on a per unit capacity.  They need to really accentuate what it can do, saying that they have seen an increase ranging from three to six times the workload per server.  Boberg added that they try to treat flash more like memory than like storage.   He said, "You wouldn't put your D-RAM on the other side of a storage network.  You would want your D-RAM right next to your applications because the latency going across a storage network would slow it down."