A blog by Steven Lamb, CEO
Whenever there’s an IOPS/throughput performance mismatch between servers and storage, requiring both server and storage administrators to make ongoing pervasive adjustments, the end result is systems that are held back from reaching their full performance potential. Diagnosing the reasons behind poor performance in today’s complex data infrastructures can be extremely difficult, especially when the issues are intermittent. Much trial and error is often required — a huge time commitment — and the cause of much anxiety in an IT team under the gun to resolve issues quickly.
This is a chronic problem for organizations, especially in today’s increasingly virtualized infrastructure. Traditional “solutions” that attempt to address these issues by fine-tuning the applications or adding ever-increasing amounts of server/memory and storage hardware often fall short in addressing the real root cause of I/O bottlenecks. Using common workarounds such as short stroking HDDs in the storage array, adding SSDs in the storage array or installing PCIe Flash cards, are simply not the silver bullet they purport to be. They are all labor intensive; often complicate the situation further by creating new problems that managers then have to redress, and ultimately contribute to a higher Total Cost of Ownership.
A new approach is available that allows for the acceleration of specific applications; makes better use of existing storage; is transparent to users, applications and storage; works with server virtualization, SAN, DAS, NAS and Cloud storage; and is interoperable with OS file caching. That’s a mighty long list of requirements; NEVEX CacheWorks meets or exceeds all of them as well as being Flash card and storage system agnostic.
Because CacheWorks is policy-based, administrators have the ability to target critical business applications and apply acceleration to them specifically. Whether the applications are running on VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines or physical servers, CacheWorks provides industry-unique control over the Windows memory cache to create a multi-level caching solution that can allow applications to exceed the performance of running fully on Flash.
If your organization is facing performance issues and traditional approaches have persistently fallen short, and if you want your systems to reach their full performance potential, consider our new and innovative software that provides application-specific acceleration – and say goodbye to I/O bottlenecks.
Until next time,
Steve
