In early 2012 SanDisk, well-known manufacturer of flash memory products, acquired FlashSoft. Like a number of other companies in the virtualization storage space, FlashSoft has several different products designed to use SSD and flash memory to cache storage I/O. They have specific products for Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and clones). They also have a product for VMware environments, SanDisk FlashSoft 3.1 for VMware vSphere.
Bob Plankers is an IT generalist with direct knowledge in many areas, such as storage, networking, virtualization, security, system admistration, and data center operations. He has 17 years of experience in IT, is a three-time VMware vExpert and blogger, and serves as the virtualization & cloud architect for a major Midwestern university.
Proximal Data AutoCache 2.0
The Proximal Data AutoCache 2.0 is a great read-only, hardware-agnostic data center virtualization caching solution for VMware vSphere environments.
Infinio Accelerator
If you use NFS-based storage in your VMware virtual environment the Infinio Accelerator might be what you’re looking for to match performance to capacity.
PernixData FVP
2013 is the year of caching. The VMworld conference was full of news about startups using expensive-yet-fast technologies like flash, SSD, and RAM to make up for deficiencies in storage performance. One of those startups was PernixData, announcing their FVP caching product.
Caching as a Service
Caching is taking over the world of virtualization in an attempt to use flash, SSD, and RAM to decouple storage performance from storage capacity.
Nutanix OS 3.5: Deduplication, New GUI, SRM, Hyper-V Support
Nutanix, one of the fastest growing IT infrastructure startups around, shows no signs of slowing down with their release of Nutanix OS 3.5. For those not familiar with Nutanix, they offer a truly converged virtualized infrastructure. This generally consists of four nodes in two rack units of space, where each node has CPU, RAM, traditional fixed disk, SSD, and Fusion-IO flash built in. Their secret sauce is really NDFS, the Nutanix Distributed File System, built by the same folks that created Google’s File System, as well as a unified, hypervisor-agnostic management interface.