Gear6 Launches a New Entry-Level Caching Appliance, the CACHEfx G100

Gear6, accelerating
I/O for real time application performance, announced the launch
of the CACHEfx G100 scalable caching appliance. This product expands
the reach of centralized storage caching to a broader customer base in
need of rebalancing their existing storage configurations to lower
total system costs, increase I/O performance, reduce rack space, and
cut expensive energy consumption. The G100 delivers the same feature
set and capabilities as the full CACHEfx product line in a more compact
and lower cost configuration. The new appliance is designed for
customers requiring moderate bandwidth and cache capacity looking to
cut costs and simplify configurations for performance oriented storage.
CACHEfx appliances scale easily as modular building blocks, allowing
customers to cost-effectively start small and “scale as you grow” as
performance requirements increase.

“A common refrain I hear from IT customers is do more with what you
have, or do more with less, particularly when addressing power,
cooling, floor-space and environmental (PCFE) issues…all without
compromising performance,” said Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst
at the StorageIO Group. “There is growing awareness that accomplishing
more per unit of energy, for example transactions per watt, or IOPS per
watt, results in better efficiency and is key to boosting storage
utilization without negatively impacting application performance and
response time. Gear6 seems to be listening with the release of its G100
caching appliance that addresses the practical metrics truly important
to data center managers.”

The new CACHEfx G100 delivers 125,000 I/O operations per second and
throughput of 800 MB per second, and features the same Reflex OS that
scales across the entire Gear6 product line. The system comes equipped
with an initial cache capacity of 128 GB consuming a scant 1,815 watts
of power. The appliance preserves valuable data center “real estate”,
requiring only 11U of rack space. As a result, the G100 provides Gear6
customers and channel partners with a critically important entry-level
scalable caching appliance to complement their data center solutions
portfolio.

“Companies are changing the way they buy and configure storage
systems,” said Chris Aliberti, vice president of sales for Insight
Investment, a premier Gear6 channel partner. “With Gear6 products
customers can now scale performance independently from capacity while
enhancing their existing infrastructure. The G100 exposes a wider group
of companies to centralized storage caching solutions and broadens our
ability to address the performance and scalability challenges facing
our clients.”

Current data center trends of more intensive and concentrated I/O
workloads have prompted many organizations to unnecessarily over
provision their storage infrastructures, which not only adds
considerable costs, but complexity as well. This includes what some
industry pundits refer to as “unnatural acts of storage” such as
placing data only on the outer edges of a disk platter – a phenomenon
known as “short stroking”; artificially capping disk capacity at 20 –
30% to ensure optimal performance; frequent migration of data between
performance and capacity-optimized platforms; and the purchase of
excess storage controllers long before maximum storage capacity is
reached.

As a network-based caching appliance, the CACHEfx G100 optimizes I/O
performance to help organizations stave off or eliminate these
expensive, resource-intensive and inefficient strategies. In addition,
the many benefits of scalable caching appliances are becoming more
pronounced as organizations grapple with the explosion of file based
content, shared I/O applications, and server virtualization
deployments. The G100 addresses each of these challenges by delivering
consistent service levels and optimized data access performance that is
essential for databases, business intelligence, and decision support
systems. This new caching appliance from Gear6 is also an attractive
solution to organizations supporting satellite data centers with less
demanding scalability requirements than their primary facilities.

The G100 is available immediately at a list price of $149,000,
delivering the performance equal to multiple storage systems.

Gear6