Fusion-io recently published a report that showed its flash cards can deliver a record-breaking 9.6 million I/O  per second. Wikibon co-founder and CTO David Floyer discussed the benchmark and the secret sauce behind the firm’s latest technical achievement on the SiliconAngle NewsDesk show (full video below).

Floyer elaborates on the fact that Fusion-io recorded 9.6 million IOSP in a test that involved a single-threaded workload consisting of 64 byte-wide, non-sequential blocks. He points out that in order to match the performance of Fusion-io’s card, which is small enough to fit inside a laptop, you’d need enough disk arrays to fill an entire data center floor.

According to Floyer, it’s the software, not the hardware, that keeps Fusion-io ahead of the competition. The platform that powers the company’s drives has three components: a virtualization layer, a filesystem called DirectFS which is far more efficient than legacy alternatives, and an architecture that can confirm a write in merely 100 nanoseconds. He emphasizes the importance of the latter:

“What this does is completely blow away the number of database calls that can be made per transaction,” Floyer says. “In my day it was around 100, if you went above a 100 database calls per transaction you’d have some profound difficulties in maintenance. That limited you in both the design of transactions and the design of the database itself.”

The call cap forced developers to implement complicated modular architectures that require a tremendous amount of system resources. Fusion-io’s software eliminates the need for such inefficient approaches.

“Another way of thinking about design is just to have a single-level database design. If you could do that and you take away the limitations of disk I/Os, which were the limitations we had before, and you could write persistently in 100 nanoseconds… you have completely rewritten the rules of design, and you can design much more efficient [and] much more functional applications.”

Floyer estimates that it will take another year or two for the competition, namely IBM, EMC, Intel and Cisco, to catch up with Fusion-io from an R&D standpoint. He nonetheless advises CIOs and CTOs to pay close attention to the technology, and stresses that traditional vendors should already start rewriting their apps.