Fusion-io has released the first SDK with native access to its ioMemory Flash memory tier. The company reasons that by integrating applications directly with ioMemory as a new persistent memory tier, developers will be able to optimize applications through direct programmatic access to the Flash memory computing layer.

NOTE: Fusion-io itself is a hardware and software storage memory platform designed to improve processing capabilities within a data center by moving process-critical, or active data, closer to the CPU where it is processed.

"Our January demonstration of one billion IOPS running on Auto Commit Memory and Atomic Writes demonstrated the potential power of running applications natively on ioMemory, and with our SDK — so we're now making these tools available to software developers," said David Flynn, Fusion-io CEO.

"The Fusion-io SDK and APIs reduce application complexity. When you get rid of that complexity, the resulting application is much more reliable and can leverage the full potential of ioMemory to run much faster," he added.

Until now, the company says that developers have been limited to tuning their applications for Flash as storage. Arguing its case for a unique selling point here, Fusion ioMemory SDK libraries are said to unlock direct programmatic access to native flash memory access patterns and data organization methods.

The Fusion-io SDK includes application programming interfaces (APIs) within user-space libraries, as well as reference application examples made available as open source.

"Improving the performance of input/output (I/O) bound applications or systems could be more pronounced and cost-effective if the choice of data to hold in flash memory is done in an intelligent and application-aware way," said Gartner distinguished analyst Carl Claunch. "Competitive advantages for software will be the main driver pushing those makers to exploit flash as a unique memory type."

The Fusion-io SDK will feature APIs including the Key-Value Store, which will feature interfaces to reduce latency, improve memory efficiency, and reduce code complexity. The directFS API provides native file-access semantics to flash through a POSIX-compliant file system. Like the native API libraries, directFS is implemented directly on ioMemory, thereby (say its makers) reducing latency by entirely bypassing operating system buffer caches, file system, and kernel block I/O layers.