SanDisk Enhances FlashSoft SSD Caching Software

SanDisk Corporation announced availability of the newest version of its FlashSoft server-side, solid state caching software, which provides several notable performance, usability and compatibility improvements for Windows, Linux and VMware environments.

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 In making today’s announcement, SanDisk also unveiled that its FlashSoft caching software will be available in bundled offerings that package the software with array of enterprise flash hardware solutions, including the Fusion ioMemory PCIe application accelerators, the Optimus Ascend SAS SSD, and the CloudSpeed Ascend SATA SSD. These offerings provide an solution that empowers customers to select the flash storage capacity and performance that best meet their data center needs.

“We have built our enterprise flash business to offer the broadest range of storage acceleration solutions to address customers’ changing needs,” said Ravi Swaminathan, VP and GM, systems and software solutions, SanDisk. “The new hardware-software bundles offer the best of both our hardware and software portfolios in a single solution. We are excited to be able to offer customers a complete solution that provides the performance and cost benefits of flash technology, while at the same time making it easier for our channel partners to support their customers.”

A recent Gartner report indicates that ‘input/output (I/O) optimization software alleviates the I/O blender‘ problem that often plagues dense VM environments and notes that these solutions can be an inexpensive and non-disruptive way to boost application performance. ⁽¹⁾ FlashSoft software does that and more. It reduces I/O latency in vSphere, Windows Server and Linux environments through the use of server-side, flash-based storage caching, which helps increase application performance in both virtualized and non-virtualized computing environments. By utilizing server-attached flash storage as an intermediate cache for an application’s most frequently accessed data, or ‘hot data,’ FlashSoft software enables that data to be read and written more efficiently. The software assigns hot data to the solid-state cache, increasing performance while reducing SAN overhead. This prolongs the useful life of current server and storage systems and delivers greater computing power, which increases customers’ ROI, while reducing the TCO for their data center.

FlashSoft deployments have shown that server-side solid-state caching provides substantial performance benefits to enterprise applications, such as OLTP workloads, online analytical processing applications and HPC. Most typical line-of-business applications-such as Exchange, SharePoint and applications based on databases, including MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle-will also see performance increases through the use of the FlashSoft software. Performance tests conducted by SanDisk using an industry-standard benchmark, showed that the new version of FlashSoft software increases application performance by over 14X compared to a baseline storage array comprised of HDDs. Storage latency was also decreased, with application response times improving by more than 22X. ⁽²⁾

FlashSoft software includes a number of enhancements that help improve performance, compatibility and usability for Windows, VMware and Linux environments, including:

• Windows Server:

  • Improved support for Hyper-V with Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV) to provide caching for Hyper-V hosts sharing storage volumes.

  • Native support for HDD drive and SSDs formatted with 4K sector size as well as 512K.

  • vSphere:

  • Certification by VMware as a Partner Verified & Supported Product (PVSP), providing customers with peace of mind that their software investment will have continued support and compatibility with vSphere as new patches and updates are released.

• Linux:

  • Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) & SUSE kernels.

  • Native support for HDDs and SSDs formatted with 4K sector size as well as 512K.

“SanDisk is an expert in solid-state storage and flash technology with a decades-long history of delivering innovation in this market,” said Al Bibergall, SVP sales, Sayers Technologies. “We’re excited to partner with SanDisk to deliver solid-state server-side caching that enables all the benefits of flash in an easy to acquire, easy to support and easy to adopt package.“

Packaging software and hardware together increase customer value
The Cache Device Bundles combine its caching software with its PCIe application accelerators and SAS and SATA SSDs to give customers the broadest range of server-side, solid state caching options from a single vendor. The bundles deliver the benefits of flash hardware and caching software in a single solution that is easy to evaluate, deploy and support, regardless of storage OSs or architectures.

Offerings include:

• Windows Server Offerings:

  • FlashSoft for Windows with Fusion ioMemory PCIe application accelerators

  • FlashSoft for Windows with Optimus Ascend SAS SSDs for stand-alone Windows Servers or Hyper-V implementations

  • FlashSoft for Windows with CloudSpeed Ascend SATA SSDs

  • vSphere Offerings:

  • FlashSoft for vSphere with Fusion ioMemory PCIe application accelerators

  • FlashSoft for vSphere with Optimus 2 Ascend SAS SSDs

  • FlashSoft for vSphere with CloudSpeed Ascend SATA SSDs

• Linux Offerings:

  • FlashSoft for Linux with Fusion ioMemory PCIe application accelerators

  • FlashSoft for Linux with Optimus Ascend SAS SSDs

  • FlashSoft for Linux with CloudSpeed Ascend SATA SSDs

FlashSoft software and SanDisk Cache Device Bundles are available for purchase now from the company and its enterprise channel partners.

⁽¹⁾  Gartner, Technology Overview for IO Optimization Software, March 18, 2015.
⁽²⁾ Based on internal testing conducted by SanDisk using the FIO.exe benchmark. Full configuration details and measured results are on record.