Gear6, accelerating storage for real time application performance, today announced key findings from server and storage studies conducted by TheInfoPro, an independent research network for the IT industry, that confirms accelerated and sustainable I/O performance is a top priority for data center managers considering server virtualization and/or storage consolidation initiatives. Based on data from “TheInfoPro’s Wave 9 Storage and Wave 5 Server Studies” it can be concluded that the ability to add sustainable I/O performance without requiring complicated storage tiering or data migrations can save companies significant time and money.

Gear6 delivers scalable caching appliances that provide such a solution through high-capacity, high speed cache memory that is shared as a network resource, serving I/O intensive requests directly from cache. This can accelerate I/O operations by orders of magnitude, which is critically important to time-sensitive businesses with data intensive applications.

“Historically, companies have had to acquire both I/O performance and I/O capacity in the same storage system, which can not only lead to system ‘hot spots’ but impact server utilization levels due to contention issues ” said Bob Gill, managing director of server research with TheInfoPro. “Our findings point to an intensifying need among data center managers for high performance IOPS solutions to optimize and sustain server utilization levels and storage retrieval response times.”

Key findings from the study include:

• Consolidation, virtualization and technology refreshes are the top three server priorities among data center managers participating in the study
• Consolidation, tiered build-outs and technology refreshes are the top three storage priorities among data center managers
• When evaluating server virtualization, companies are most concerned with performance under load, with nearly 40% of respondents citing this as the number one consideration
• When determining which applications to deploy on a given server, respondents ranked “performance/utilization” as the number one criteria
• 30% of respondents cite dynamic provisioning as the most important virtualization benefit by 2010

 

A Gear6 white paper, developed in conjunction with TheInfoPro, expands on these key findings and is now available. The Growing Need to Deliver Sustainable I/O Performance can be downloaded at http://www.gear6.com/whitepapers/infopro and will be available at the Gear6 Booth PP4 at Storage Networking World, October 15-18, in Dallas.

“The data collected by TheInfoPro studies clearly demonstrates the need for sustainable I/O performance,” said Gary Orenstein, vice president of marketing with Gear6. “Essentially, companies are striving for ways to place frequently accessed data in a higher performance storage category, and less frequently accessed data in a lower performance category without the manual efforts associated with storage tiering and data migration. Centralized caching is alleviating these considerable headaches today to help companies save significant amounts of time, resources and money.

High Performance IOPS with Gear6 CACHEfx Appliances

CACHEfx appliances deliver high I/O operations per second (IOPS) and extremely low latency to accelerate the performance of data intensive applications. The appliances scale to multiple terabytes of capacity and attach to the network, complementing both traditional Network Attached Storage (NAS) deployments and clustered file systems. Serving requests from high speed memory provides applications a massive throughput increase and real time access to data. Large files, data sets, and entire databases are reliably cached to accelerate I/O performance up to 10 to 50 times faster than from slower mechanical disks.

The CACHEfx appliances provide performance and scalability equivalent to multiple high-end storage systems to free I/O constrained applications. The appliances feature a highly available clustered architecture with redundant network connectivity and power sources for maximum reliability. They also scale linearly to support thousands of simultaneous clients by delivering data in parallel. With extremely low latency responses, real time data delivery is ensured consistently. In addition, the CACHEfx appliances can be added on-the-fly with no downtime to scale to multiple terabytes of memory-based cache capacity and transparently interoperate with all existing NFS-based storage systems to provide maximum investment protection.