id7 VS-fusion SAN Accelerator for IO Intensive Applications

id7, UK-based developer of interconnecting storage technologies, have announced the VS-fusion SAN Accelerator solution, designed to share and optimise server-deployed, NAND flash-based ioMemory from Fusion-io across the entire SAN as a connected appliance.

The combination of id7’s VS-fusion SAN accelerator, and Fusion’s ioMemory technology, has achieved significant benchmarked improvements in terms of performance, availability and energy efficiency. (results boost existing and new HDD Storage Array IOPS by up to 100x whilst reducing latency).
 
What this means from a business perspective within the data centre is that whilst consolidation and virtualisation look like attractive propositions, in practice they are stalled by the demands of storage. Capacity demands can realistically only be addressed by the use of traditional hard disk drive (HDD) technology, frequently resulting in widespread implementation of standard SAN solutions running hard disk drives with an increase in random, multi-thread read/write data activity across the network, in effect crippling HDD technology due to high I/O demand and culling the primary objective of consolidation.

id7’s VS-fusion SAN Accelerator combines Fusion-io technology and id7’s cache algorithms as one SAN connected appliance to boost existing and new HDD Storage Array IOPS by up to 100 times whilst also reducing latency. The net result is that demanding business applications, such as Oracle, SQL & Exchange, run faster and deliver performance boosts to existing VM and VDI environments across the entire SAN.

Mark Klarzynski, CEO of id7, takes up the story: "It’s not just the performance acceleration that the VS-fusion addresses. It also overcomes other data centre virtualisation challenges like attempting to isolate and migrate hot spots of activities to SSDs. High performance HDDs are costly to any organisation, both in terms of initial outlay and ongoing upgrades. Using id7’s VS-fusion, virtualised environments gain combined enterprise-class performance delivered by id7’s advanced cache and generic ioMemory capability as well as significant reductions in data centre space and energy requirements."

Within id7’s VS-fusion, writes are cached and accelerated whilst the algorithms start to populate the ioMemory. This proved significant in the recent benchmark tests performed on Dell Equallogic PS with 16 x 15K RPM SAS drives connected over iSCSI, where IOPS were increased over a 24 hour period from 800 IOPS to 76,000 IOPS, by using VS-fusion.

Tyler Smith, Vice President of Alliances, Fusion-io, comments on the relationship: "Fusion-io pioneered the use of flash memory deployed via the server through PCI Express to provide ultra high performance for even the most  demanding applications. We are excited to continue along this path of innovation with id7 to offer high availability shared storage that allows multiple hosts to benefit from the same performance boost. We chose to collaborate with id7 because they share our view that performance is best maximized by seamlessly connecting directly to the host or SAN and providing multiple connectivity options including Fibre, iSCSI and InfiniBand."
 
Neil Munday, VP Sales and Marketing, id7 comments: "Working with Fusion-io is a fantastic opportunity for id7 to deliver an enterprise-class, complimentary, range of solutions that will act as a real value proposition and differentiator to our channel partners and ultimately our end-user customers by delivering significant ‘carbon friendly’ performance and return on existing investments."
 
MSRP Pricing for the VS-fusion ranges from £35,990 to £47,495 with capacity ranges from 320GB to 1280GB respectively and includes Fibre Channel, iSCSI and InfiniBand connectivity as a default. The VS-fusion is available to purchase through id7’s network of direct partners.