PernixData Enhanced FVP Resource Management and Visibility

Server-side storage intelligence has become a major presence in virtualized data centers, with PernixData, Inc. selling more FVP software in the first twelve months of shipping than any enterprise infrastructure software company to date.

The company is expanding its storage intelligence solution with more enterprise features, including DFTM-Z adaptive compression, intelligent I/O profiling, and Role Based Access Control (RBAC). These features make it easier to decouple storage performance from capacity for optimum application performance with scale-out growth and zero disruption to existing IT infrastructure.

“Decoupling is about moving storage intelligence into servers to get scale-out performance, efficient resource management, data center design flexibility, and a future proofed storage architecture,” said Jeff Byrne, senior analyst and consultant, The Taneja Group. “PernixData has made decoupled storage a reality by creating a clustered software platform that turns high speed server media into a perfect complement to any shared storage environment.”

Server-Side Storage Intelligence
FVP software puts storage intelligence into high speed server media, establishing a control point for optimizing application performance and managing data center operations with scale-out growth. Customers can leverage any storage platform for capacity, creating a decoupled storage architecture that maximizes design flexibility while minimizing storage costs.

Features of FVP software include hypervisor clustering, topology aware fault tolerance, read and write acceleration, and seamless support for any shared block and file storage systems. In just a short period of time, these capabilities have enabled hundreds of companies across the globe to accelerate approximately 200,000 virtual workloads using a decoupled storage architecture.

The latest version of FVP software (version 2.5) makes it easier to deploy
decoupled storage architecture by adding following new features:

Memory performance at price of flash with DFTM-Z adaptive compression
A decoupled storage architecture uses the latest in high speed server media for the fastest VM performance and cost effective scale-out. FVP leverages both flash and Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory (DFTM) for this purpose, letting companies deploy storage acceleration on virtually any host.
 
Given that memory (i.e. RAM) typically offers less capacity than flash, it historically has been used to accelerate only small footprint, low latency workloads like virtual desktops. To make memory cost effective for all applications, including data intensive tier 1 apps like virtualized databases, PernixData introduces DFTM-Z. This is a new feature that compresses data in a DFenvironment, maximizing the capacity of the underlying RAM hardware by 4x or more on average. With DFTM-Z, customers can now obtain the performance of memory at the price of flash.

DFTM-Z compression is adaptive based on traffic characteristics, dynamic, and transparent to the workload. This ensures compression overhead never adversely impacts VM performance.

Optimize what you can, bypass what you must with intelligent I/O profiling
PFVP has always had the ability to accelerate on a per VM basis, applying acceleration policies to individual workloads. PernixData has taken this one step further by adding a new intelligent I/O profiling function to FVP software.

With this new feature, FVP dynamically detects in real-time which workloads are suitable for server side acceleration and which are not (e.g. large sequential reads and writes). In the latter environment, reads and writes are automatically sent right to shared storage, bypassing local server media. This not only maximizes the performance of these workloads, but it maximizes the performance of workloads using server side acceleration by ensuring server flash and RAM is available for storage acceleration when needed.

Granular visibility with Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
FVP software is increasingly being installed in private cloud deployments and from service providers with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings. To facilitate this trend, PernixData recently introduced a subscription version of FVP software to align with managed service offerings. In addition, these environments usually have multiple tenants who desire unique views into their own infrastructure and application environments. To support this functionality, PernixData has added Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to the latest version of FVP software, letting administrators control who has access to the PernixData user interface and what information they can see.

In addition, RBAC can be used within an IT department to give granular access to acceleration data. For example, a database administrator can be given visibility into database statistics while excluding visibility into other VMs.

The new intelligent I/O profiling and RBAC features are available in the latest version of all FVP editions (Standard, Enterprise, Subscription, VDI and Essentials Plus). DFTM-Z is available in version 2.5 of FVP Standard, Enterprise, Subscription, and VDI editions.        

To download free trial of FVP software version 2.5 (registration needed)