Virident Flashmax Connect Software Available

Virident Systems Inc. announced the availability of its FlashMAX Connect.

The software solution creates a storage management layer integrated with the FlashMAX II PCIe storage. The FlashMAX Connect suite provides low latency, while delivering the shared capacity, manageability, and HA of legacy SAN architectures.

FlashMAX Connect is designed to optimize the use of server-side flash storage for database applications, including applications where a single PCIe card can be utilized by multiple servers.

"Flash has proven to be a disruptive and opportunistic technology that maximizes performance of critical applications. Virident has seen flash become pervasive in Web 2.0 Internet properties and we believe it will become ubiquitous in traditional enterprises and data centers," said Mike Gustafson, CEO of Virident. "With the launch of FlashMAX Connect software, Virident is fulfilling the vision of server-side flash as a platform for shared storage and the foundation for the performance tier of storage."

FlashMAX Connect is the key to unlocking the rigidity of server-side flash by providing shared storage capabilities inside the server and where the application lives to deliver high performance, shared capacity while remaining highly available.

FlashMAX Connect includes several software modules:

• vHA: provides high-throughput, HA, low-latency synchronous mirroring across servers for data residing on FlashMAX II SCM devices.
• vShare: enables block-level shared access to FlashMAX II SCM devices from multiple server nodes. This allows customers to share the storage residing on remote servers and thereby scale PCIe flash capacity independent of compute.
• vCache: accelerates SAN or DAS storage by using FlashMAX II SCM devices as high-performance PCIe-attached flash cache. vCache eliminates double mapping of block addresses and provides up to six-times higher performance and longer flash lifetime compared to third-party caching solutions built on SSDs.

"PCIe flash storage gives us the highest bandwidth and the lowest response times. This is great. But how do you make use of it in cluster applications that require shared storage access," said George Sucher, VP sales at Razor Technology, LLC. "With FlashMAX Connect we can now share PCIe flash between multiple servers and, as a result, accelerate distributed applications that require high-bandwidth/low-latency/high-IO/s access to shared storage. There are many applications that require fast distributed storage access but without a doubt, the applications that would benefit the most from FlashMAX Connect are data-access-intensive applications such as distributed databases – Oracle RAC being a good example of such applications."

"When Virident’s FlashMAX II is combined with Percona’s server on today’s high-performance hardware, there is a five to 15 times larger consolidation factor. This improves performance and hardware utilization at a much lower price-to-performance ratio, while balancing memory, CPU, and I/O capacity," said Vadim Tkachenko, CTO of Percona, LLC. "FlashMAX Connect software builds upon this synchronous relationship by adding flash-aware network-level storage capabilities to provide the essential level of scalability and throughput necessary for implementing a long-term economic MySQL database strategy in the enterprise."