New Gadget 2011

While solid state disk/SSD (flash memory) sales are still just a small fraction of those of hard drive sales, they are growing rapidly, with average annual unit growth of 90 percent, and revenue growth of 55 percent between 2010-2015. So it's no longer a case of if flash will become a major component of enterprise storage, but where, says Silicon Valley start-up FlashSoft. The company is exiting stealth mode with what it calls the first commercial offering for 'flash virtualization', FlashSoft SE for Windows Server 1.1.0, an all-software, hardware-independent, 'tier minus one' caching approach that eliminates the IO bottleneck without the cost of putting all data onto flash memory and without disrupting server-tier applications, data structures, or underlying storage infrastructure.
The company has two customers using its offering in production and reporting a 10-100x performance improvement over flash sitting in storage arrays below the SAN. It says benchmark OLTP testing shows it delivers 4x faster performance and handles workloads with 75 percent less storage overhead. FlashSoft credits Fusion IO for paving the way for moving data back to the server two years ago, and now its doing the same thing for SSDs with its software-only approach. Rather than putting all of an application's data onto flash, it's tier-minus-one concept puts just the hottest data onto flash, caching the 20 percent of an application's data that makes up 80 percent of the server IO, where IO runs in microseconds.
FlashSoft SE has been in beta for the last five months and is available for a free 30-day trial. A VMware version is slated for the end of summer or early Fall, preceded by a Linux beta, say company officials. Current hardware partners include LSI and SanDisk, but the company is working with a number of others and will offer 'tuned' versions that will deliver better results as they become available.
Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., calls FlashSoft's approach intriguing. "Of course we've got used to what SSD acceleration of IO in the server can do for performance because of -- for instance -- Fusion IO, and look at their valuation. FlashSoft is essentially delivering on the same concept but using software that can work with basically any type/vendor's SSD. It then adds sharability for networked storage environments and a bunch of smart software features.....which has to be attractive."
SSD in the server is a good idea, because the latency involved in going through a shared storage controller is minimized, says Jim Bagley, senior analyst and business development consultant, Storage Strategies NOW. "FlashSoft is in a good position, having focused on the Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V for their first release. Others working in this field, like IOTurbine, are doing VMware first."
celebritycombo.com