InfoWorld reviews InovaWave's DXtreme for Windows 2.0 product.  The product received an 8.8 Excellent rating and Paul Venezia had the following to say:

One question mark always hanging over virtual servers is I/O performance. Unless the underlying OS and file system are specifically designed to handle a virtualization load, disk I/O can be problematic. With products like VMware ESX 3, the I/O subsystem drivers are tuned to a virtualization load, handling the widely disparate requests faster and more fluidly than the stock subsystem found in Windows Server and most Linux distributions. This isn’t a fault of these operating systems or their file systems, it’s simply a facet of the virtualization picture: A VM load is far different than a standard server load.

I/O performance for virtual machines is where Inovawave is focused. DXtreme is a shim that sits in the Windows I/O subsystem, speeding up I/O requests with intelligent caching and predictive block retrieval. Essentially, DXtreme gives a standard I/O device some logic specific to virtualization loads.

Today DXtreme is limited to 32-bit Windows hosts and virtualization platforms that run on Windows. But although the initial market is small and the product very new, hopefully the coming months and years will bring Inovawave's innovations into the broader market of VMware ESX, Xen, and other Linux-based VM solutions, because if my testing is any indication the company has made significant strides in improving I/O subsystem performance for virtualization workloads.

Bottom Line:
Inovawave has performed some neat magic with DXtreme, significantly ramping up VM disk I/O through a combination of intelligent caching and predictive block retrieval. It’s limited to 32-bit Windows host platforms now, but 64-bit versions are on the way. If coming versions maintain the performance and broaden the application, DXtreme will be high octane fuel for any virtualization infrastructure.

Read the entire review, here.