Out of Stealth Nevex Reveals SSD Caching Software

NEVEX Virtual Technologies, a Toronto-based developer of application optimized caching solutions, announced CacheWorks 1.0, an approach to flash caching that solves the storage I/O bottleneck while enabling better utilization of existing storage infrastructures.

The technology from an executive team that has worked together for 20 years across multiple start-ups, CacheWorks accelerates the performance of critical business applications running on physical servers and VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines.

It is a server-level caching software solution providing application performance gains. CacheWorks is a file-based cache integrated with the Windows Server operating system, providing control over the Windows memory cache to create a multi-level caching solution that can allow applications to exceed the performance of running fully on flash.

"NEVEX is turning the traditional caching approach on its head, by moving from a reactive mode to a proactive determination of what gets the benefits of caching," said Mark Peters, Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Being both flash-agnostic and file focused, NEVEX empowers administrators to decide precisely what data is most critical to their organization and then to surgically deliver IO acceleration - improving performance and reducing latency - where it is needed and most valuable."

CacheWorks' selective cache optimization technology empowers administrators by providing flexible control to accelerate specific data by application, file type, and location. This caching solution can proactively optimize the cache for application-specific I/O acceleration.

"Our background is in building applications so we view storage in a completely different light," said Steven Lamb, CEO of NEVEX. "By dividing the problem into two separate issues, performance and capacity, we were able to develop a solution that accelerates the former and makes better use of the latter."

CacheWorks installs on physical and virtual servers and uses a flash/SSD to intelligently cache active application data. I/O-bound Windows applications such as databases, business intelligence, mail servers, and transactional web servers run up to 5X faster because they are not constrained by the slower speed of hard disk storage or latency to backend storage.

"CacheWorks' ability to unlock the value in SSDs by seamlessly combining them with spinning disk in the server itself is nothing short of brilliant," said Geoff Barrall, Founder of BlueArc, Drobo, now CTO of Overland Storage and a NEVEX board member. "The team's focus on developing state-of-the-art file system caching technology to combine both disk types is the right approach and one of the reasons I enthusiastically promote this company. The product is great; we use the software here and in our environment have seen 3X acceleration in our enterprise applications."

"As an emerging science and technology incubator, we see a lot of start-ups come through MaRS. NEVEX stands out because they have all the right pieces in place: technology know-how, market smarts, and a solid team," said Mark Zimmerman, MaRS Emerging Technologies Advisor. "MaRS conducted a beta test in our lab and saw 3X speed improvement with NEVEX CacheWorks. We were very impressed by the results and support their efforts 100%."

"Our customers are mid size manufacturers and distributors with large and complex data intensive environments. Performance improvement through an alternative technology solution is often a more cost effective way to achieve the speed they need," stated Dan Oughton, CTO of IndustryBuilt Software, an ERP provider. "They depend on us to recommend the best value for their dollar when it comes to hardware. Spending money on high end infrastructure to solve an application performance issue is simply not viable for some of our customers. We have been testing NEVEX CacheWorks with several of our customers, demonstrating 4X acceleration. We anticipate the performance improvement will be consistent across our customer base."

NEVEX CacheWorks is deployable on 64-bit Microsoft Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2008 R2 running on a physical machine or virtually on Windows Hyper-V or VMware, and is compatible with any Windows-supported flash device.

Price: $2,495 per physical server. A subscription program will be made available for those customers who prefer fixed monthly expenses. NEVEX will initially sell direct to customers at $1,495, enabling them to take advantage of introductory pricing and first-touch service until NEVEX channel partners are fully established. CacheWorks has immediate limited availability with general availability within 30 days.


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