Start-Up Storspeed Out of Stealth Mode

Storspeed, Inc. announced the availability of the industry’s first application-aware caching platform, delivering predictable, high-performance storage to customers’ applications regardless of backend storage infrastructure.

The explosion of stored data continues to challenge IT managers to scale their infrastructure to meet application requirements. As applications drive increased utilization of available storage, performance invariably suffers.

Solutions based on complex tiering and racks of spinning disk create large on-going capital and operational expenses. Storspeed’s SP5000 overcomes the drawbacks of these conventional solutions, delivering consistently fast storage performance to meet demanding application requirements while eliminating complexity and reducing expenses.

“IT managers now have the tools to ensure their application performance requirements are met regardless of the storage backend,” said Mark Cree, Storspeed CEO. “Our advanced packet inspection engine enables the deployment of low-cost commodity storage while delivering enterprise-level performance. No longer do IT managers have to pay a premium for capacity in order to get performance.”

With the Storspeed platform, IT managers can deliver enterprise-class performance from solutions typically used for ‘bulk’ data. Private storage clouds and SATA-based storage solutions fronted by Storspeed can deliver the high performance required by today’s applications. By coupling existing storage with low-cost SATA disks, Storspeed reduces the overall storage footprint with no changes to existing operational procedures. Storspeed has demonstrated this type of architecture in multiple environments and has enabled reductions in overall storage footprints by as much as 90 percent.

Storspeed’s patent-pending real-time traffic inspection engine identifies and dynamically accelerates user and application traffic automatically with no user intervention or complex tiering. Moreover, the inspection engine delivers comprehensive reporting of client/storage access across all connected storage systems, regardless of vendor. Storage administrators, for the first time, have a reporting system that can identify storage ‘hot-spots’ and connect storage usage back to users, IP addresses, virtual machines, and applications in multi-vendor environments. Once these hot-spots are found they can easily be controlled and accelerated with Storspeed’s application-aware technology.

"Storspeed lets me meet scale-out performance demands without any of the science project risks. It just makes everything work better, faster, and easier. What’s not to love?" said Steve Duplessie from Enterprise Strategy Group.

A solution that scales to user and application needs
The SP5000 scales to meet business performance objectives, enables consolidation of existing storage, and provides unparalleled visibility into application performance and capacity requirements. Supporting 10 and 1 gigabit Ethernet storage infrastructures, the SP5000 takes advantage of both DRAM and FLASH memory technologies. By adding nodes, a SP5000 configuration can be scaled to support millions of ops/sec and gigabytes of throughput. The SP5000 provides unsurpassed high-availability with redundant systems, dual power supplies, fans, and a unique ‘fail-to-wire’ feature that ensures connectivity to backend storage is never lost.

The Storspeed SP5000 is invisible to applications, storage, and network infrastructure. No operational changes are required to begin realizing performance and visibility benefits. Storspeed’s standards-based approach ensures compatibility with all prevalent storage and networking equipment deployed in today’s data centers.

The Storspeed SP5000 application-aware caching appliance is available now. Pricing starts at $65,000 and includes 80 GB of DRAM, full suite of management and reporting software, and eight drive bays for flash-based SSDs.

Read also:
Secret Start-Up Storspeed Opens its Web Site
But the company remains in stealth mode.