Gary Orenstein, senior vice president of products for Fusion-io, took some time off this week to chat with SiliconAngle founding CEO John Furrier and Wikibon’s Dave Vellante. The trio discussed flash, Big Data, and software-led infrastructure.

Orenstein, a Cube alumnus, starts the discussion by providing an overview of the solid-state market. He explains how flash evolved from a niche market to a rapidly growing vertical buzzing with activity, and adds that the industry has reached a tipping point.

Furrier picks up from Orenstein left off and brings up the topic of hyperscale. He details how enterprises are adopting scale-out, commodity infrastructure to eliminate the ‘commercial software tax’, replacing proprietary products with open-source software such as Hadoop. These open solutions are quickly gaining traction, a trend propelled by flash.

Orenstein concurs and elaborates. He says that hyperscale begins at the consumer: it’s about serving billions of people with billions of devices as cost efficiently as possible. This too necessitates solid-state storage:

“We often talk a lot about this being sort of a storage-centric effort, and I don’t think that’s always true. I sometimes joke with folks that this whole initiative is not about making storage go faster; it’s really about making sure the application doesn’t go any slower,” he says. “It’s subtle, but that twist and that mindset allows us to really leave no stone unturned: we don’t have a legacy investment in older storage architecture that we have to protect… our objective is helping customers process the maximum amount of data with the least amount of infrastructure, both the hardware infrastructure and the software infrastructure.”

Fusion-io has doubled down on the latter area. The company’s unique Atomic Writes software can increase performance and media longevity by 200 percent, and the technology it obtained through the recent acquisition of ID7 will enable it to serve storage over iSCSi much more effectively. Fusion-io is also contributing to Linux and a number of other open-source projects; and it’s collaborating with the channel to integrate its SDK with popular databases. At present the kit only supports MySQL, but Orenstein says that his company has plans to add mainstream systems such Cassandra, HBase MariaDB and MongoDB to the list.

According to the executive, Fusion-io’s focus on open-source is driven by its commitment to software-led infrastructure, or SLI. Orenstein says that his company’s goal is to deliver open solutions that don’t force users into deploying technology that may not meet their business requirements.