Astute ViSX SSD Appliance Eliminating I/O Bottlenecks for VMs

Astute Networks, Inc. announced that Storage Strategies NOW, Inc., an industry analyst firm, outlines the advantages of Astute’s ViSX G4 Flash VM storage appliance in its December 2012 Snapshot Report, Astute Networks Accelerates Critical Datastores with Network-Attached Flash Appliance.

The report, authored by James E. Bagley, senior analyst, and founding analyst Deni Connor, highlights Astute’s DataPump Engine technology as a "significant differentiator" and explores how ViSX is a high value solution for organizations wanting to add performance improvements in minutes and without making disruptive changes to their existing environment.

For many organizations, traditional HDD systems are increasingly becoming a performance bottleneck – especially for business-critical applications in virtualized infrastructures. Storage Strategies NOW explores how ViSX overcomes these challenges through the combination of its Networked Flash architecture and its patented DataPump Engine technology which offloads all storage I/O (iSCSI) and network I/O (TCP) protocol processing. As a result, the performance of both physical and virtual applications can be dramatically accelerated.

"Any organization seeking to improve application performance, particularly in virtualized environments, can take advantage of the ViSX Networked Flash Architecture," state Bagley and Connor in the report. "ViSX provides tremendous IOPS per dollar value, with an ease of installation that is very compelling. Astute provides a particularly reliable implementation of high-speed storage for business-critical applications in organizations that want to simply add performance without the replacing or modifying existing infrastructure."

The Storage Strategies NOW Snapshot Report provides a detailed analysis of how ViSX delivers its performance advantages by analyzing the solution’s DataPump Engine and Networked Flash architecture and how they enable high-performance environments. The report also describes the customer benefits of ViSX, including how one ViSX user, Visioneer Inc., a manufacturer of document imaging equipment, deployed ViSX and immediately achieved a 1,500% boost in critical database read performance compared to their existing infrastructure.

ViSX Flash VM storage appliances are purpose-built and optimized to deliver random IOPS performance and IOPS per dollar value, helping to unleash the potential of flash performance, value, and investment, particularly in demanding virtualized environments. The architecture combines reliable eMLC flash modules with Astute’s own custom designed high-performance, DataPump Engine I/O processor to offload and accelerate network (TCP) and storage (iSCSI) protocol processing. Tightly fused, they eliminate critical I/O bottlenecks that affect virtualized application and VDI performance and provisions shareable flash performance to all VMs and applications on all hosts over standard Ethernet networks. The result is a virtual infrastructure that is high-performance, free of oversubscriptions, predictable, easy to manage and free of complexity.

"We are pleased to see Storage Strategies NOW acknowledge the purpose-built benefits and value of ViSX by correctly identifying its key advantages in delivering non-disruptive, quick to deploy, and easy to manage application performance for a variety of environments. By eliminating performance-robbing bottlenecks that degrade productivity, ViSX delivers predictable and sustained application performance that, to date has been unachievable at the price/performance value we provide," said Steve Topper, CEO of Astute Networks.

To download the complete research note