Condusiv Technologies the world leader in software-only storage performance solutions for virtual and physical server environments, today released V-locity® 6.0, featuring Condusiv's IntelliMemory server-side DRAM read caching engine that is now 3X faster than the previous version due to a behavioral analytics engine that focuses on "caching effectiveness" instead of "cache hits." V-locity 6.0 is I/O reduction software for virtualized environments that delivers 50-300% faster application performance without any additional hardware.   

"Typically, when a vendor is into the 6th generation of any technology, performance enhancement is incremental in nature. That status quo couldn't be further from the truth as we just released the highest performing product in the 33-year history of the company that is now 3X faster than the previous version of V-locity," said Brian Morin, SVP, Global Marketing, Condusiv Technologies. "Performance bottlenecks from I/O inefficiencies are plaguing today's enterprises with an expensive and unsustainable business model of reactively buying more flash or spindles to satisfy application performance SLAs. With the release of V-locity 6.0, we are ending this vicious cycle with software intelligence that cures the problem of increasingly smaller, more fractured, and random I/O that penalizes application performance." 

V-locity 6.0 contains two key technologies that reduce I/O from VM (virtual machine) to storage. The first is its proprietary IntelliWrite® engine that increases I/O density from VM to storage by adding a layering of intelligence into the Windows OS that eliminates I/O fracturing so writes (and subsequent reads) are processed in a more contiguous and sequential manner. This reduces the I/O requirement for any given workload and increases throughput since more data is processed with each I/O operation. The second key technology, IntelliMemory DRAM read caching, has been greatly enhanced in V-locity 6.0 by focusing on serving only the smallest, random I/O - the primary culprit that dampens overall system performance the most. IntelliMemory has also been enhanced with an extremely lightweight compression engine that expands the amount of data that can be serviced by DRAM without visible CPU overhead.

"Typical IT administrators respond to application performance issues by reactively throwing more expensive server and storage hardware at them, without understanding what the real problem is," said Rich Reitenauer, Manager of Infrastructure Management and Support, Alvernia University. "Higher education budgets can't afford that kind of brute-force approach. By trying V-locity I/O reduction software first, we were able to double the performance of our LMS app sitting on SQL, stop all complaints about performance, stop the application from timing out on students, and avoid an expensive forklift hardware upgrade."

Condusiv's V-locity 6.0 with enhanced IntelliMemory DRAM read caching offers:

• Enhanced Performance - Iometer testing reveals the latest version of IntelliMemory in V-locity 6.0 is 3.6X faster when processing 4K blocks and 2.0X faster when processing 64K blocks.
• Self-Learning Algorithms - IntelliMemory collects and accumulates data on storage access over extended periods of time and employs intelligent analytics to determine which blocks are likely to be accessed at different points throughout the day.
• Cache Effectiveness - By focusing on "cache effectiveness" rather than the commodity and capacity-intensive approach of "cache hits," V-locity determines the best use of DRAM for caching purposes by collecting data on a wide range of data points (storage access, frequency, I/O priority, process priority, types of I/O, nature of I/O (sequential or random), time between I/Os) - then leverages its analytics engine to identify which storage blocks will benefit the most from caching, which also reduces "cache churn" and the repeated recycling of cache block.
• Data Pattern Compression (DPC) - A very lightweight data compression engine, V-locity doesn't tax the CPU with visible overhead, eliminating the need for dedicated compute resources.

"Most organizations already have 3-4 GB of available DRAM per VM. That may not sound like a lot of capacity for caching purposes, but when you're talking about the fastest storage media possible that is exponentially faster than SSDs and sits closer to the processor than anything else, it's the perfect place and size to satisfy problematic I/O that dampens overall performance the most - small, random I/O. For those workloads that have up to half a terabyte of DRAM or more, V-locity will provide "other-worldly" performance gains," said Brian Morin.

V-locity has been adopted by nearly 2,000 virtualized organizations to solve their most I/O intensive challenges and is proven to dramatically improve performance in Tier I applications such as those running on SQL, Oracle, Exchange, ERP, CRM (including Salesforce), OLTP, data warehousing and analytics, EHR/EMR applications (such as MEDITECH), Business Intelligence (BI) applications, file servers, and web servers. V-locity 6.0 will ship within the first week of July.