SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced the next generation of FlashSoft software for Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft Hyper-V. This newest version of its FlashSoft server-side, solid state caching software delivers customers significant application performance acceleration gains, up to three to five times, especially in transactional and virtualized environments which often experience high I/O latency.

“This new offering exemplifies our dedication to transforming the data center through flash technology,” said Ravi Swaminathan, vice president and general manager, Systems and Software Solutions, SanDisk. “We recognize that efficient access to data for key applications is an essential requirement for our enterprise customers. The new version of FlashSoft software now offers customers even better application acceleration, regardless of the environment or scale.”

FlashSoft software, now updated for Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Linux operating systems, ensures that the most frequently accessed data (hot data) is serviced by server-side flash rather than slower back-end storage. This alleviates storage performance bottlenecks and accelerates applications by reducing response time, without mandating a large investment in hardware. Organizations running large database-driven applications on shared storage infrastructures typically experience high I/O latency as the primary constraint on application performance. FlashSoft software helps address the pain points of these enterprises by dramatically improving availability of hot data.

Key benefits of the latest FlashSoft update include:

• Application Acceleration: Leveraging FlashSoft, enterprises can accelerate application performance by a 4.38 times increase in transactions per second.
• Policy-based Caching: the new file-level policy-based caching technology improves caching efficiency by allowing administrators to exclude specific files from the cache. Testing conducted by SanDisk showed caching with FlashSoft improved a SQL Server workload’s performance by 2.8 times in a Windows Server Hyper-V environment, and that performance gain was increased to 5.9x when the file-exclusion feature was used to cache only the most critical data.
• SAN Relief and Workload Density: FlashSoft also reduces traffic on storage networks and storage systems (“SAN relief”), which can prolong the useful life of current storage investments. Moreover, it also enables more workloads on accelerated hosts (increased workload density per host server), which can greatly reduce software license costs.

FlashSoft is compatible with any enterprise flash device, including PCIe, NVMe, SAS or SATA interfaces from all vendors. The software runs in any standard x86-based server, working efficiently with both storage area network (SAN) and Direct Attached Storage (DAS) configurations.