SanDisk FlashSoft Software for Enhanced Application Performance in Hyper-V and Windows Server

SanDisk Corporation announced the next generation of FlashSoft software for Windows Server and Hyper-V.

This version of its FlashSoft server-side, solid state caching software delivers customers significant application performance acceleration gains, up to three to five times ⁽¹⁾, especially in transactional and virtualized environments which often experience high I/O latency.

Performance tests illustrate FlashSoft software was able to accelerate
the workload from 450 IOPS to 6,462 IOPS – over 14x increase
in performance compared to the non-accelerated back end.
Storage latency was also greatly improved dropping
from 1,272 milliseconds to 55.65 milliseconds – over 22x improvement
in response time.

“This new offering exemplifies our dedication to transforming the data center through flash technology,” said Ravi Swaminathan, VP and GM, systems and software solutions, SanDisk. “We recognize that efficient access to data for key applications is an essential requirement for our enterprise customers. The new version of FlashSoft software now offers customers even better application acceleration, regardless of the environment or scale.“

FlashSoft software, now updated for Windows Server, Hyper-V, and Linux OSs, ensures that the most frequently accessed data (hot data) is serviced by server-side flash rather than slower back-end storage. This alleviates storage performance bottlenecks and accelerates applications by reducing response time, without mandating a large investment in hardware. Organizations running large database-driven applications on shared storage infrastructures typically experience high I/O latency as the primary constraint on application performance. FlashSoft software helps address the pain points of these enterprises by dramatically improving availability of hot data.

Benefits of FlashSoft update include:

• Application Acceleration: Leveraging FlashSoft, enterprises can accelerate application performance by a 4.38 times increase in transactions per second ⁽²⁾.

• Policy-based caching: the new file-level policy-based caching technology improves caching efficiency by allowing administrators to exclude specific files from the cache. Testing conducted by SanDisk showed caching with FlashSoft improved a SQL Server workload’s performance by 2.8 times in a Windows Server Hyper-V environment, and that performance gain was increased to 5.9x when the file-exclusion feature was used to cache only the most critical data1.

• SAN relief and workload density: FlashSoft also reduces traffic on storage networks and storage systems (‘SAN relief’), which can prolong the useful life of current storage investments. Moreover, it also enables more workloads on accelerated hosts (increased workload density per host server), which can greatly reduce software license costs.

FlashSoft is compatible with any enterprise flash device, including PCIe, NVMe, SAS or SATA interfaces from all vendors. The software runs in any standard x86-based server, working efficiently with both SAN and DAS configurations.

⁽¹⁾ Based on internal testing. As measured using an OLTP benchmark suite with MS-SQL Server. Complete test report available.
⁽²⁾ Application performance testing conducted by SanDisk used a HammerDB workload on SQL Server to demonstrate a 4.4 times increase in transactions per second.