Report on Astute Networks ViSX G4 Flash VM Appliance

Astute Networks, Inc. announced that analyst firm Dragon Slayer Consulting has identified its ViSX G4 Flash VM storage appliance as a top solution for eliminating the storage I/O bottleneck frustration of virtualized environments.

The paper, How to End Virtualization Administration Storage Frustration, written by Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting, analyzes and reviews the common storage performance barriers that plague virtualized environments and how Astute’s ViSX G4 Flash VM storage appliance uniquely overcomes those obstacles.

"There are many storage performance barriers facing virtualization and storage admins," said Staimer. "Some are architectural. Some are organizational. Some are product implementation-specific. All are extraordinarily aggravating. Astute Networks, with its family of purpose-built ViSX appliances, has an exciting new approach to removing performance barriers that offers an incredible IOPS/dollar value for server and desktop virtualization."

The white paper examines in detail the storage problems virtualization administrators must deal with on a day-to-day basis and the alternative approaches to solving those problems. The report further discusses why these approaches are deficient for performance constrained virtualized environments and how ViSX uniquely solves these vexing problems.

Dragon Slayer confirms that ViSX G4 Flash VM storage
appliances deliver the following advantages:

• IOPS, Throughput, and IOPs/dollar – ViSX is comprised of 100% flash storage technology that provides an order of magnitude higher performance than HDD-based systems. Astute’s patented DataPump Engine completely offloads and accelerates TCP and iSCSI protocol processing to eliminate both network and storage I/O bottlenecks, outperforming conventional Ethernet deployed flash or hybrid storage systems by as much as 5 to 10 times. This enables leading IOPS/$ for virtualized application and VDI deployments.
• Low TCO – Astute makes deployment cost a non-issue by utilizing both higher reliability eMLC flash technology and a primary data deduplication algorithm that increases storage capacity and has zero impact on performance. This low effective dollar per gigabyte complements the power, cooling and floor space advantages of ViSX.
• Purpose-Built for the Virtualization Administrator – Pre-configured for out of the box deployment in minutes, ViSX is easily provisioned and managed via its vCenter plug-in.
• Enterprise Reliability – ViSX delivers four levels of reliability: on-chip flash error detection and correction; eMLC flash devices to extend the usable life of flash modules; multiple levels of RAID, including 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10; and flash module over-provisioning to improve overall reliability and also maintain maximum write performance over time.
• Integrated In-Line Deduplication – ViSX’ deduplication technology has no impact on performance, unlike other flash systems that experience dramatic levels – 50-70% – of I/O degradation when processing and increases overall effective capacity.

ViSX Flash VM storage appliances are purpose-built to deliver random IOPS performance and IOPS per dollar value, helping to unleash the potential of virtualized environments. ViSX’ Networked Flash architecture combines reliable eMLC flash solid state storage modules with Astute’s own custom designed high-performance, 10/1GbE DataPump Engine protocol processor to offload and accelerate network (TCP) and storage (iSCSI) protocol processing. Tightly fused, they eliminate all critical I/O bottlenecks that affect virtualized application and VDI performance and provisions sharable flash performance to all VMs on all hosts over standard Ethernet networks.

"The frustrations experienced by today’s virtualization managers are very challenging to resolve," said Len Rosenthal, SVP of marketing of Astute Networks. "That’s why we developed our purpose-built ViSX Flash VM storage appliances. They accelerate virtual machine performance while giving the admin out-of-the-box simplicity to realize dramatic performance gains in minutes. The Dragon Slayer Consulting white paper deftly frames the virtual server manager’s challenges and underscores the unique value of ViSX to resolve them in a non-disruptive, easy to deploy, and cost-effective way."

To download the Dragon Slayer Consulting white paper