Astute Networks, Inc., the leading provider of performance storage appliances for virtualized environments, today announced the expansion of the ViSX family of Performance Storage Appliances with enterprise-class data protection and a new MLC flash offering that will be particularly attractive to the small to medium enterprise (SME) and small-to-medium business (SMB) market. The new MLC flash-based ViSX has been optimized to dramatically lower its cost-per-GB for enterprise-class performance at provide an all flash appliance solution that is comparable in price to disk-based storage systems. Astute also announced ViSX Replicator, a flash-optimized data availability solution that supports both synchronous and asynchronous replication.

Astute breaks application performance barriers by resolving critical I/O bottlenecks with the ViSX family of solid state (SSD) flash-based Performance Storage Appliances for physical and virtual environments. Based on its patented 10GbE DataPump Engine and Networked Flash architecture, ViSX gives IT managers a simple to deploy storage I/O acceleration appliance that boosts business critical application performance in minutes and VDI performance by up to 10X. As a result, companies improve user productivity, customer satisfaction and revenue generation while eliminating the over-provisioning of storage, servers, and network resources. ViSX co-exists with installed storage systems and delivers 100% flash performance in a non-disruptive, simple to deploy solution, at prices comparable to disk-based systems.

The new Astute ViSX Performance Storage Appliance now offers customers a choice of either lower cost MLC flash or higher reliability eMLC flash. This enables Astute customers the unique opportunity to balance cost per GB, cost per IOPS, and overall longevity to meet their business and IT objectives. When combined with the newly released ViSX Performance Dedupe facility, a ViSX appliance can be acquired for less than $2 per GB at industry-leading IOPS per dollar. The newest flash storage modules are available in 400GB, 800GB and 1.9TB capacities which can be mixed and matched within the same ViSX 2U appliance. These units are ideally suited for cost-conscience SME and SMB data centers that want to experience the performance benefits of flash without the disruption factor associated with PCIe cards and complete SAN replacements.

Astute now supports comprehensive synchronous and asynchronous replication to increase data availability for mission-critical applications. ViSX Replicator software will be deployed in a local or remote redundant configuration for increased overall data availability. ViSX Replicator helps ensure business continuity by providing local and distance replication while maintaining application and data integrity. It improves business resilience by enabling disaster recovery testing with online data and minimizes operational disruption of planned maintenance or outage events.

"When it comes to performance sensitive applications, all flash storage that is priced comparable to disk-based storage is the ideal solution that every customer is seeking," said Arun Taneja, founding and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. "Astute appears to be the only storage company that offers a compelling and affordable all flash storage solution that is specifically designed for the mid-sized and small business markets."

Annandale, Va.-based health care provider, Professional Healthcare Resources (PHR) is dedicated to helping thousands of Maryland, Virginia, and DC patients improve the quality of their lives. Facing high data growth and increasing application performance demands, PHR began searching for a new scalable, but cost-effective storage solution to augment its existing hard disk based storage systems. That's when it discovered the value of Astute's ViSX solution.

"The difference in performance between our existing storage array and the ViSX appliance was like night and day," said Hussein Sh-Ibrahim, IT Director for PHR. "The ViSX deployment was very easy and the entire solid state solution was surprisingly affordable. Productivity and efficiency is up, and our employees can now quickly access patient data like never before. Backups that used to take four to five hours now complete in less than an hour. If you want fast performance quickly, get ViSX."

ViSX Quadruples Capacity, Adds Advanced Replication and Achieves a Price-Per-GB as Low as $2

New features include:

• Expanded capacity to 45TB in a 2U enclosure
• Choices of MLC or eMLC NAND flash modules
• Capacity choices of 400GB, 800GB, and 1.9TB per solid state drive (SSD) modules.
• ViSX Replicator asynchronous and synchronous replication software.
  

ViSX offers the lowest $ per IOPS and the lowest cost per GB of any iSCSI-based flash solution due to its patented DataPump Engine, which offloads TCP and iSCSI network processing. The DataPump Engine gives ViSX the 3-5X performance advantage over all of its flash and hybrid disk/flash competitors that offer iSCSI-based storage solutions.

"Mid-sized enterprise and small business customers tells us that they want a robust all-flash storage solution that is non-disruptive to their existing infrastructure and delivers a compelling combination of high capacity, high data availability, and random IOPS performance at a truly affordable price," said Len Rosenthal, senior vice president of marketing, Astute Networks. "Our ViSX performance storage appliances break the price-per-capacity barrier of solid state flash while offering the highest IOPS per dollar for Ethernet connected storage in the industry."

Astute uniquely offers a no-performance-impact inline primary deduplication capability, called ViSX Performance Dedupe, that enables customers to drive down the amount of storage needed by 5X and also get the performance, floor space, power and cooling benefits of 100% solid state with the prices comparable to hard disk based systems. As the DataPump Engine offloads the storage and network protocol processing from the main storage processors, the processors and memory are now freed up to focus on deduplication processing. As no other flash-based vendor has a DataPump Engine, they all experience significant performance degradation when deduplication is enabled.

The ViSX family of Performance Storage Appliances are available now with pricing that starts as low as $32,000 MSRP.