Tuesday, April 5, 2011

TurboCharger appliance models provide 2.5TB or 6.5TB of SSD capacity, 1.6GB/s of bandwidth and 100,000 IOPS through 2 front-end and 2 back-end 8Gb FC ports. Appliances can scale linearly, accelerating up to 64TB of primary storage. GridIron uses custom FPGAs to drive the performance for the realtime analytics needed to produce this access intelligence. This knowledge of data access patterns also enables the system to keep appropriate data sets in RAM longer and reduce flash wear issues. As a “SAN proxy device” they can accelerate all servers and storage on the network and can be implemented without impacting hardware, software or data processes that are in place.

Storage Swiss Take

There are a lot of different ways to improve application performance, some of which seem to just throw hardware (and money) at the problem. When storage I/O is the bottleneck these ‘solutions’ can result in an enormous waste of resources as more spindles and now more solid state storage are added. Instead, GridIron has taken a ‘work smarter’ approach by learning the data access behavior of applications to solve the question of which data to cache and when. And, the resulting efficiency has another benefit, it also saves cost by reducing the amount of hardware and software infrastructure required.

Eric Slack, Senior Analyst