Fusion-io makes flash storage that can credit a tremendous amount of its popularity to the sophisticated software powering it, such as the Atomic Writes I/O cutting extension. The company is responsible for slowly pushing SSDs into mainstream IT, and its new SDK is certainly underscoring this goal.

Fusion-io announced today its first software development kit this week, a release that allows developers to optimize their apps to the underlining ioMemory infrastructure powering their apps. This is more than just expanded tweaking capabilities: the SDK allows programmers to work right on top of the bare metal using libraries and a few reference examples demonstrating the native access.

The libraries contain APIs with the Key-Value Store, code that reduces latency and increases efficiency. Another interface is directFS, a file system blueprint implemented right on top of ioMemory.

“Direct programmatic access to the ioMemory tier presents a rare and significant leap forward for computing, and the ioMemory SDK makes that integration powerfully simple for application developers,” said Citrusleaf founder and CTO Brian Bulkowski. “When you consider that Fusion-io is already well known for accelerating applications, it’s exciting that bypassing traditional protocols in favor of direct access to ioMemory would mean an even greater performance boost boost in Citrusleaf’s NoSQL database for mission critical webscale applications.”

Application-aware flash and big data seem to go hand in hand. Fusion-io’s approach is offering a lot of options to developers, although it’s not the first release that falls in this very specific category.

Just this month social media giant and big data fountain Twitter open sourced a few of its MySQL tweaks. Among the other changes that the resident DBAs have made to optimize the database to Twitter’s workloads they’ve added optimization for flash storage layers.