SmartTier Software for SSDs and PCIe Flash Devices From Assurance Storage

Assurance Storage, Inc., provider of storage software for high performance autonomic tiered storage for data-intensive applications such as virtual environments, virtual desktops (VDI), business and scientific analytics, data warehousing, and cloud architectures, announced the availability of SmartTier software for SSDs and PCIe NAND Flash devices.

This software brings significant benefits of intelligent, autonomic data cache and tier management used to optimize performance of I/O intensive applications.

Customers using SmartTier gain the benefits of aligning the value of data with the value of SSD and Flash to improve performance for a variety of business critical applications such as:

• OLTP increases precision and access speed
• OLAP provides real-time data updates
• Database Management Systems such as Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL
• Metadata Management for large content repositories
• Cache Management Engine for NAS/SAN storage

With SmartTier, Assurance introduces an adaptive architecture that dynamically manages data stores to boost application performance and eliminate the limitations of using SSD and PCIe architectures. It takes the guesswork of managing data cache and metadata through autonomic intelligence frequency based algorithms adding needed precision to data access.

"The Assurance SmartTier software provides the ability to utilize Flash technologies in tera-scale for fast access of the most frequently read data," said Steve Visconti, President and CEO at Assurance. "With a solution this precise, automated and scalable offers for the first time the ability to design flexible storage architectures better utilizing new technologies such as PCIe NAND Flash and SSD as an effective solid state storage tier".

"I am delighted with Assurance SmartTier software implementation which offers breakthroughs for large scale enterprise-class performance and the ability to meet demands of fast access I/O in Cloud applications," said David Korba, CEO and Founder of CloudLogistix, provider of services to help customers move to cloud based solutions. "This helps us tackle the problem of lack of data freshness in OLAP and provides elasticity with traditional OLTP applications in cloud architectures. With Assurance we can now overcome performance bottlenecks with precise real-time data refresh."

Assurance SmartTier can be used with SSD or PCIe NAND Flash devices such as Fusion-io ioDrive II or Virident TachIOn.

The five main features are:

• Access Profiler for precise adaptive histograms exposing current data IO hotspots,
• Tiered Management Engine for either Frequency Based Replacement based on IO access pattern changes or the users own heuristics,
• Ingest Accelerator provides low latency log-structured write-back FIFO completions includes Set IO reforming,
• Egress Accelerator detects sequential initiator streams with an 8 Gigabyte read-ahead cache,
• Solid State LUN Manager for VLUN creation and management.

In a typical scenario, the system is configured with both Intel SSD and Fusion-io PCIe cards in the servers accessing data from traditional storage pools.

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