Storage Switzerland Reports on Astute ViSX G4 Flash VM Storage Appliance

Astute Networks, Inc. announced that analyst firm Storage Switzerland has recognized the Astute ViSX G4 Flash VM storage appliance as an ideal solution for virtual server managers seeking a ‘drop in’ performance boost for virtual server and VDI environments.

The research note, A New SSD Solution for Tier 2 Virtualized Data Centers, written by Eric Slack, senior analyst at Storage Switzerland, identifies ViSX G4 as an attractive solution for mid-market virtualized environments.

Flash technology can help demanding environments, such as virtualized servers and VDI, overcome the challenges of heavy I/O demands required by random data requests. Yet, for many companies, flash technology can be seen as too expensive, too disruptive to deploy, and often underutilized. Storage Switzerland has recognized that ViSX G4 has the ability to solve these problems.

"Astute has stated their mission is to provide cost effective, high performance, simple to deploy, network-based flash appliances -purpose-built for virtualized environments," said Slack in the research note. "The ViSX VM storage appliances, with their advanced 10Gig DataPump Engine, can provide the virtual server manager a ‘drop in’ performance boost to an existing SAN or NAS environment while preserving the flexibility and VM migration benefits of a shared storage architecture."

The Storage Switzerland research note
explores how Astute achieves the following:

• TCP and iSCSI Acceleration – Using its own internally develop and patented Astute DataPump Engine, a TCP and iSCSI protocol processor, Astute maximizes Ethernet network bandwidth and random IOPS from flash without the cost or complexity of FC, making it a better fit for mid-market enterprise environments.
• Network-based Performance Storage Tier – ViSX can share flash capacity and performance across multiple physical and virtual servers, allowing VMs to be moved between hosts as workloads change. This helps to improve application performance and increase VM density while improving flash storage utilization.

ViSX Flash VM storage appliances are purpose-built to deliver random IOPS performance and IOPS per dollar value as well as leading VDI desktop per dollar, helping to unleash the potential of virtualized environments.

ViSX’ Networked Flash architecture combines reliable eMLC flash modules with Astute’s own custom designed high-performance, 10/1GbE DataPump Engine protocol processor to completely 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.

"Today’s virtualized environments need to achieve high performance for their virtual server and desktop applications without high cost, deployment complexity, or intrusive upgrades," said Len Rosenthal, SVP of marketing of Astute Networks. "At Astute, we have developed a solution that can provide the IOPS mid-size data centers require in an intuitive, easy to deploy solution that is both cost effective and efficient. The Storage Switzerland research note and video clearly defines the value we bring to our customers."

More information in the Astute ViSX G4 Flash VM storage appliance is available by viewing the Storage Switzerland ‘Chalk Talk’ video hosted by George Crump, president and founder of Storage Switzerland and featuring Astute networks CEO Steve Topper.