Astute Networks: DataPump Engine With Networked Flash Architecture

Astute Networks, Inc., provider of high-performance virtual machine storage appliances, announced its next-generation ViSX G4 flash VM storage appliance.

Featuring Astute’s Networked Flash architecture and game changing, patented DataPump Engine, ViSX G4 eliminates the barriers to virtualizing tier 1 business-critical applications, deploying VDI, and increasing VM density to accelerate virtual machine performance by up to 10x.

I/O bottlenecks are causing unacceptable performance for business-critical applications in virtualized environments, or are preventing organizations from deploying their vital applications into their virtual infrastructure because virtualization taxes traditional storage and network resources. To overcome this challenge, companies often over-provision their storage resources to gain more throughput, or they simply don’t virtualize the majority of their business-critical applications. This inability to scale performance across multiple servers and applications impacts end-user productivity, customer satisfaction, and the value of virtual infrastructure investments.

SSDs added to servers and to legacy SAN and NAS systems only address a part of the problem. They are expensive, disruptive to deploy, and not optimally designed for highly virtualized environments. ViSX was designed to remove VM storage and network performance barriers. Astute’s patented 10GbE DataPump Engine and Networked Flash architecture found in every ViSX flash VM storage appliance, are engineered to deliver fused, performance, low power solutions that remove all storage and network I/O constraints to accelerate VM and application performance.

"The battle is on for enabling mission critical applications to be brought under the purview of VMware and thereby gain all the advantages server virtualization has to offer," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. "But this is easier said than done. The culprit is unquestionably storage. A number of vendors are trying to solve this problem using flash’s I/O performance advantages over HDDs. Astute Networks has applied their unique expertise in chip design and I/O stack acceleration to achieve an unprecedented combination of flash performance, deployment simplicity, and low cost to meet the needs of virtual server administrators. The DataPump Engine allows them to deliver wire speed on 10GbE and inline data deduplication without impacting IOPs or throughput. Virtual server managers will find this innovative approach worth evaluating."

SSD is becoming the preferred solution for VM storage. The combination of technology advancements, such as eMLC flash, decreasing prices, and improved reliability and durability are propelling the worldwide enterprise solid state storage market substantially higher. IDC reports that the worldwide SSD industry revenue reached $5 billion in 2011 and is expected to increase at a CAGR of 51.5% from 2010 to 2015.

"Astute Networks’ ViSX appliances are truly revolutionary," said Walt Thinfen, VP and CIO, Visioneer, Inc. "It has given us a 1,500% boost in read performance on critical applications, has accelerated our most demanding VMs, and noticeably increased the performance of our database applications and Microsoft SharePoint environment."

The ViSX G4 flash VM storage appliances work with virtualization platforms including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and Red Hat RHEV.

By complementing existing SAN or NAS infrastructures, with a non-disruptive, additive, and optimized flash-based datastore tier, ViSX G4 appliances satisfy the performance requirements demanded by today’s business-critical applications such as VDI, cloud computing, and big data.

Network-based, ViSX provisions up to 140,000 sustained random IOPS that is shareable by all VMs on all hosts over pervasively deployed 10GbE or 1GbE networks – all in a cost effective, multi-terabyte, and standard 2U rack mount device.

Capabilities of the ViSX G4
The key to ViSX G4’s performance and $/IOPS is its patented DataPump Engine, a custom ASIC that provides hardware-based offload and acceleration for all storage I/O (iSCSI) and network I/O (TCP) protocol processing. This eliminates both storage and network I/O bottlenecks and maximizes the IOPS performance that flash can sustain.

ViSX G4 appliances also support an algorithm for primary deduplication that offers very high rates of compression to increase storage capacity and, unlike nearly all other storage solutions, either flash, hybrid, or disk-based, has zero impact on performance. ViSX appliances support all common RAID levels, with flash optimized firmware enhancements, as well as on chip error detection and correction. Unique to ViSX is the approach used in overprovisioning each of its hot swappable flash modules to increase overall reliability and improve write performance by reserving a quantity of pre-erased blocks that accelerate garbage collection. All ViSX appliances are managed by a new VMware vCenter plug-in for vSphere environments, or by its flashWRX GUI for other hypervisor platforms such as Hyper-V, Xen, and RHEV.

Key features in ViSX G4 include:

• Up to 140,000 sustained random IOPS
• 9.6TB of reliable eMLC hot-plug flash modules per 2U configuration
• RAID-0, -1, -10, -5 and -6
• 2 x 10 GbE and 4 x 1 GbE ports – all ports active; mix & match
• Primary deduplication, with no impact on performance
• VMware vCenter plug-in management and enhanced  flashWRX GUI and CLI
• Low $/IOPS and $/VDI user

"ViSX G4, with its DataPump Engine, is a powerful solution designed to eliminate I/O constraints and virtual machine performance barriers while increasing application performance and reducing management complexity," said Steve Topper, CEO, Astute Networks. "By integrating with the hypervisor’s built-in functionality, ViSX can be non-disruptively deployed in minutes and intuitively managed by any virtualization administrator with unprecedented performance and ease-of-deployment that truly set ViSX apart from the crowd. VMs can be deployed in minutes. Now, performance storage for VMs can be too."

ViSX G4 will be available in the fourth quarter of 2012 with pricing starting under $50,000, including support and service.

Astute and the ViSX G4 VM Storage appliance will be displayed at VMworld at San Francisco, CA’s Moscone Center from August 26-30.