The O’Reilly OSCON 2013 is in full swing this week in Portland, Oregon and will continue until Friday July 26.

OSCON is an open source convention that is all about how the close partnership between business and the open source community is building the future. It is where developers, innovators, businesspeople, and investors come together to talk about the future.

At the event, Fusion-io Lead Architect Nisha Talagala presented “Flash Aware Applications,” wherein she discussed flash-aware open-source database applications, a Key Value interface to flash that enables NoSQL databases to become more flash aware.  Talagala also touched on the topic of making the Linux virtual memory swap subsystem flash-aware; how these applications make use of new flash based primitives such as Vectored Atomic Writes, Persistent TRIM, EXISTS and Sparse Access; and performance, endurance, memory consumption, and overall efficiency improvements possible via this approach; and offered an overview of work in standards bodies and operating systems to support these capabilities.

Wikibon CTO and Founder David Floyer is at OSCON 2013 taking it all in, sharing his experience on this morning’s Live NewsDesk Show with Kristin Feledy.  In today’s segment, Floyer tells us what’s going on at the event, and drills down on Fusion-io’s approach in open source and flash-aware applications.

Flash-aware applications know that they’re writing to flash-persistent storage, or non-volatile storage components.  This market is powered by market front-runners like Fusion-io, which has already contributed three elements this year alone.

Fusion-io announced new milestones in the development of its flash-aware applications, such as the Fusion-io Atomic Writes API, which contributed standardization notes to the T10 SCSI Storage Interfaces Technical Committee, now in use in mainstream MySQL databases MariaDB 5.5.31 and Percona Server 5.5.31 as well as the upcoming Percona Server 5.6.  Fusion-io will also be contributing its nonvolatile memory key-value interface to flash, NVMKV, to the Open Compute Project and has posted the first flash-aware Linux kernel virtual memory Demand Paging Extension to GitHub for community testing.

Flash-aware applications also take away the constraint in developing apps, and do so 10,000 times faster than traditional methods.

“What you can do then is design things in a completely different way,” Floyer explains. “So your applications, instead of being lots of small modules tied together, lots of small databases – there can be one flat, big database and you can design systems instead of seeping data to actually take large gulps, firehoses of a data and work with that.

“The new types of applications,  for it to be profoundly different, the databases will need flash aware capabilities, the applications that need flash aware capabilities and this is very very exciting time for ISVs to look at opportunities for completely changing the way that traditional applications is served.  And I think the most important people in this ISV will be the cloud service providers they’re gonna be in the vanguard of this new movement,” Floyer stated.

For more of Floyer’s Breaking Analysis, check out the NewsDesk video below:

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