4Blox Inc., dedicated to improving iSCSI SAN performance, today announced that it has teamed with two leading technology vendors, Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and VMware, in its efforts to build a strong network of industry partners to ensure delivery of high-performance storage solutions that meet market requirements.

4Blox, a Red Hat Ready Partner, has recently become a Red Hat ISV Partner, extending the company’s access to the tools and resources necessary to develop, test and deliver its applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a leading server platform in storage processing environments.

The company has also joined VMware’s Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. Virtualization is driving a data center infrastructure refresh, but with virtualization comes increased host CPU resource constraints associated with storage protocol processing. 4Blox’s software approach to iSCSI acceleration can be dynamically enabled in one or more Guest OSes offering storage system vendors a more flexible and lower-cost alternative to hardware-based offload processing solutions.

iSCSI-based Storage Area Networks (SANs) experience severe system performance degradation when used on standalone servers with large numbers of users or with bandwidth intensive applications – like backup and video, and on virtualized servers where CPU resources are constrained by multiple Guest OSes. The CPUs deployed in typical storage subsystems are quickly overloaded with iSCSI processing and 10GbE connections can exhaust host CPU processing with even a small number of users.

“It is critical for us to work with market leaders in the storage industry to create a true high-performance iSCSI storage solution,” said Dan Munro, CEO of 4Blox. “By working with Red Hat and VMware’s extensive resources, we can ensure that storage solutions incorporating our 4Mezzo acceleration components are optimized for the leading enterprise open-source operating system and virtualization environments.”