Flash Caching Overrides I/O Bottlenecks on Physical, Virtualized Servers Alike

These days, there is a cavalcade of new products designed to eliminate the I/O bottlenecks that are bogging down application performance for so many virtualization users. Nevex, a self-funded company to date, is one of the latest market entries to unveil such a market-changing product with the introduction of Nevex CacheWorks 1.0, which the company says employs an innovative approach to Flash caching that solves the storage I/O bottleneck using existing IT infrastructures.

CacheWorks is said to enhance the performance of business apps running on physical servers along with VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V VMs. As what Nevex calls the first-ever focused server-level caching software solution, CacheWorks is a file-based cache integrated with the Windows Server operating system that provides "industry-unique control over the Windows memory cache to create a multi-level caching solution that can allow applications to exceed the performance of running fully on Flash."

The key to CacheWorks performance is its ability to empower admins by enabling flexible control that expedites the movement of specific data by application, file type, and location. Nevex says no other caching solution can "proactively optimize the cache for application-specific I/O acceleration."

CacheWorks installs on physical and virtual servers and employs a Flash/SSD to intelligently cache active application data. I/O-bound Windows applications such as databases, business intelligence, mail servers and transactional web servers reportedly run up to five times faster because they are not constrained by the slower speed of hard disk storage or latency to back-end storage.

Although Nevex is charging $2,495 per physical server for CacheWorks, it says it will initially sell direct to customers for $1,495, enabling them to "take advantage of introductory pricing and first-touch service until Nevex channel partners are fully established."

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/20/2011 at 12:48 PM