Lee Caswell, the vice president of virtualization for Fusion-io’s Production Group, stopped by theCube during the recently concluded VMworld 2013 conference to share his unique perspective on the disruptive force of flash.

From a customer standpoint, solid-state memory represents a means to accelerate mission-critical workloads that could not be effectively virtualized before. Mission-critical applications stand to benefit from flash just as much as virtual desktop infrastructure, a use case that Fusion-io is actively targeting with a new solution called ioVDI. Caswell says that the platform builds on the company’s existing ioTurbine acceleration software to deliver greatly improved user experience at the same cost as traditional stateless desktops.

The executive tells theCube hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante that ioTurbine serves as a foundation for driving value on the application level. He explains that the solution eliminates the I/O blender effect at the virtualization layer to reduce unnecessary writes and deliver faster boot times higher up the stack.

Asked to comment on the evolving role of traditional disk, Caswell highlights that “for years the disk drive has been doing a duel service. It’s been providing both performance, which it’s not very good at, and capacity, which it’s very good at. As you look at flash right now – this is one of the reasons Fusion-io is so successful – a single PCIe card serves the performance delivery of over 200 [disk] drives. There’s this radical split happening: wherever you can take the performance and disaggregate it from the capacity needs, now that’s changing extremely fast.”

The adoption of software-defined methodologies is one of the main drivers behind the shift from capacity to performance. Fusion-io is accelerating this transition with ioControl, a hybrid storage platform that enables admins to allocate cores on the fly through API calls.

Enterprises are leveraging Fusion-io’s solutions to make gains across the board. Caswell details that his company’s drivers empower users to reduce database response times, accelerate data analysis and realize a wide range of other benefits. On average, customers record a 10x application performance increase after deploying flash in their environments.

Caswell wraps up the interview by drawing comparisons between flash and virtualization, two technologies that he says achieve the same objectives. These include consolidating IT infrastructure, slashing costs, and delivering software-driven capabilities such as high-availability and vMotion.

Click the video below for the full highlights, including new details about the dynamic between Fusion-io and the Big Data community.