Gear6, accelerating I/O for real time application performance, today announced the launch of the CACHEfx G100 scalable caching appliance. This product expands the reach of centralized storage caching to a broader customer base in need of rebalancing their existing storage configurations to lower total system costs, increase I/O performance, reduce rack space, and cut expensive energy consumption. The G100 delivers the same feature set and capabilities as the full CACHEfx product line in a more compact and lower cost configuration. The new appliance is designed for customers requiring moderate bandwidth and cache capacity looking to cut costs and simplify configurations for performance oriented storage. CACHEfx appliances scale easily as modular building blocks, allowing customers to cost-effectively start small and “scale as you grow” as performance requirements increase.

“A common refrain I hear from IT customers is do more with what you have, or do more with less, particularly when addressing power, cooling, floor-space and environmental (PCFE) issues…all without compromising performance,” said Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at the StorageIO Group. “There is growing awareness that accomplishing more per unit of energy, for example transactions per watt, or IOPS per watt, results in better efficiency and is key to boosting storage utilization without negatively impacting application performance and response time. Gear6 seems to be listening with the release of its G100 caching appliance that addresses the practical metrics truly important to data center managers.”

The new CACHEfx G100 delivers 125,000 I/O operations per second and throughput of 800 MB per second, and features the same Reflex OS that scales across the entire Gear6 product line. The system comes equipped with an initial cache capacity of 128 GB consuming a scant 1,815 watts of power. The appliance preserves valuable data center “real estate”, requiring only 11U of rack space. As a result, the G100 provides Gear6 customers and channel partners with a critically important entry-level scalable caching appliance to complement their data center solutions portfolio.

“Companies are changing the way they buy and configure storage systems,” said Chris Aliberti, vice president of sales for Insight Investment, a premier Gear6 channel partner. “With Gear6 products customers can now scale performance independently from capacity while enhancing their existing infrastructure. The G100 exposes a wider group of companies to centralized storage caching solutions and broadens our ability to address the performance and scalability challenges facing our clients.”

Current data center trends of more intensive and concentrated I/O workloads have prompted many organizations to unnecessarily over provision their storage infrastructures, which not only adds considerable costs, but complexity as well. This includes what some industry pundits refer to as “unnatural acts of storage” such as placing data only on the outer edges of a disk platter – a phenomenon known as “short stroking”; artificially capping disk capacity at 20-to-30 percent to ensure optimal performance; frequent migration of data between performance and capacity-optimized platforms; and the purchase of excess storage controllers long before maximum storage capacity is reached.

As a network-based caching appliance, the CACHEfx G100 optimizes I/O performance to help organizations stave off or eliminate these expensive, resource-intensive and inefficient strategies. In addition, the many benefits of scalable caching appliances are becoming more pronounced as organizations grapple with the explosion of file based content, shared I/O applications, and server virtualization deployments. The G100 addresses each of these challenges by delivering consistent service levels and optimized data access performance that is essential for databases, business intelligence, and decision support systems. This new caching appliance from Gear6 is also an attractive solution to organizations supporting satellite data centers with less demanding scalability requirements than their primary facilities.

Pricing and Availability

The G100 is available immediately at a list price of $149,000, delivering the performance equal to multiple storage systems. Resellers have embraced the G100, with participating members of the Gear6 Accelerate Partner Program offering a breadth of solutions based on the product.