Astute Networks SSD Appliance Easy to Implement

Astute Networks, Inc. announced that analyst firm Storage Switzerland has recognized the Astute ViSX G4 Performance Storage Appliance as an easy to implement plug and play solution for virtual server environments.

The Storage Switzerland research note, All-flash Appliance for Mid-market Compliments Existing Storage, written by Eric Slack, senior analyst, Storage Switzerland, states that the ViSX appliance is designed to go in easily and complement the existing storage infrastructure to boost critical application performance.

Every flash-based storage system offers clear and significant performance benefits over the traditional HDD-based storage systems typically found in SAN and NAS devices. The challenge is obtaining the performance benefits of flash in a cost-effective way that is sharable over standard low cost Ethernet-based networks.

“ViSX is ideal for virtual server environments where flash is needed to address the ‘I/O blender’ problem, but more capacity is required than can be provided by server-side solutions,” said Eric Slack in the briefing note. “By leveraging iSCSI, Astute has made ViSX a ‘plug and play’ solution, one that’s easier to actually implement and use. And by integrating the TCP offload engine, users will be impressed with the performance it can deliver.”

The ViSX Performance Storage Appliances are designed to accommodate highly random I/O workloads as well as provide the ability for a company to scale out and up with ease as performance and capacity requirements increase by adding additional SSD modules to the chassis or by adding additional 2 EIA Rack unit G4 appliances. Each ViSX scales to 140,000 sustained random IO/s and can be clustered together to scale in excess of one million sustained random IO/s configured either as one large datastore or multiple independent datastores.

ViSX was designed to be non-disruptively deployed as an additional performance tier to complement existing SAN or NAS environments; not a rip and replace or forklift upgrade solution. IT system administrators will see ViSX as an iSCSI target on the network, which is provisioned and managed via the VMware vCenter plug-in tab or through the ViSX FlashWRX GUI for non-VMware environments. To increase overall application performance, move the most frequently accessed applications or VM datastores to experience higher performance in minutes.

“Mid-sized enterprises are under constant pressure to ensure that end-users are satisfied with the performance of their applications and the virtual and physical infrastructure that underpins them,” said Mike Schmitt, director of marketing, Astute Networks. “Astute breaks application performance barriers by resolving critical I/O bottlenecks with the ViSX family of networked flash solutions. Based on its patented 10GbE Data Pump Engine and Networked Flash architecture, ViSX gives IT managers a simple to deploy storage I/O acceleration appliance that boosts Tier 1 application and VDI performance by up to 10X.”

To download the briefing note