Gear6 Accelerates Data Center I/O Performance

Gear6 announced a
suite of tools to understand, improve, and manage I/O
performance. Reflex OS, powering CACHEfx scalable caching appliances,
provides a centralized view of data traffic between NFS clients and
servers.

As a result, system administrators now have unprecedented
visibility into workload profiles to diagnose performance problems and
also correct them. Typically, profiling tools are restricted to
identifying performance issues but require separate problem resolution
through manual intervention. With its combination of fine grained
statistics and intelligent caching, the CACHEfx appliance uniquely
integrates the ability to identify and fix I/O performance problems on
the fly.

“The tightly integrated analytics of CACHEfx appliances provide deep
insight into application I/O patterns from a central viewpoint without
relying on agents,” said Martin Patterson, vice president of
engineering, Gear6. “By combining a high level picture of application
behavior plus a detailed NFS operations breakdown, administrators can
quickly diagnose and resolve storage performance issues.”

Reflex OS provides a comprehensive view of application behavior and
workload statistics that have previously been difficult or impossible
to collect. Primary metrics include latency, I/O Operations per Second
(IOPS), and bandwidth consumption. CACHEfx appliances record specific
and granular application data requests, giving administrators an
understanding of the active data set size, requested files, and cache
hit rate. While other analysis tools often layer onto existing systems,
adding overhead and potentially disrupting the environment, Reflex OS
analysis features are built into the software, seamlessly providing
insight while also dramatically increasing I/O performance.

“Gear6 has delivered real value for customers to observe and
automatically manage both dynamic and persistent data with their
CACHEfx scalable caching appliances,” said Steve Duplessie, founder and
senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. “The innovative
centralized caching approach allows dynamic data to remain in
high-performance cache, yet also retains existing persistent,
disk-based storage to cost-effectively scale capacity for large
content-centric data stores. This is having your cake and eating it
too."

CACHEfx appliances deploy as a shared network resource, providing
end-to-end visibility for all accelerated NFS servers and clients,
aggregating I/O profiles across multiple applications, storage devices,
and up to thousands of clients. This unique visibility is one of the
reasons customers describe part of the Gear6 solution as ‘the best NFS
sniffer on the market.’

Modern applications frequently support thousands of users and rely
on large server farms accessing data from multiple storage systems.
These large scale shared I/O architectures present a significant
performance improvement challenge to system administrators. By caching
most frequently accessed data in large scale memory, CACHEfx appliances
instantly and seamlessly accelerate data access to existing storage
devices. Files automatically populate the cache upon application
request without manual data migration or complex multi-tier approaches.
Real time statistics provide live performance and traffic monitoring
enabling system tuning if needed. As applications evolve or are added
over time, CACHEfx supports live configuration adjustments to optimize
the changing environment.

Centralized storage caching solutions support any NFS-based file
system, including clustered file systems. They attach transparently to
the network using standard Gigabit or 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections
and no changes are required for existing applications or systems. Gear6
provides a straightforward Management Information Base (MIB) and
supports the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) so customers can
tap into the rich statistical data and integrate with existing
enterprise management frameworks.

Gear6