When you work with virtual or cloud environments, there is a very good chance that at some point you will have to deal with I/O performance–related issues. A company named Infinio has a solution. Infinio just announced the release of Infinio Accelerator 2.0 at VMworld. Infinio Accelerator is a server-side, software-based storage I/O optimization program. It works by creating a server-side cache that, according to Infinio, “is the only true scaling out of the performance layer that will also perform cache encryption, compression, [and] deduplication and is listed at half the cost of the competition.”
Infinio has done a great job in the ease-of-use department: Accelerator requires only a single button-push to enable the acceleration, resize the cache, and begin the product’s uninstall process. Infinio Accelerator will install virtual appliances or cache virtual machines on each node in a cluster. These appliances run as the cluster-aware cache sitting on top of hypervisor, with a plugin that runs in kernel mode. These cache VMs are installed with two processors and 9 GB of RAM each. The 9 GB of RAM used for caching, from what I saw, is the reflection point at which there is limited or no real measurable return when increasing the cache size. Though this is true as a general rule, when additional cache is needed, using a slider and making a single button-push are all that is necessary to perform the task automatically to all the nodes without being disruptive. The cache content is fully accessible across all nodes but is not replicated between the nodes.
When Infinio Accelerator deploys the cache virtual machines, all the cache VMs share a single address space and perform inline deduplication of the cache, which has seen some of the greatest performance increases within VDI and DevOps environment use cases. Nevertheless, any and all environments can benefit from this technology. It takes no time at all to get Accelerator going: a mere twenty minutes to heat the cache or reach the point at which the cache is fully ready and optimized.
If you are looking for ways to squeeze more performance from your VMware environments, this software would be a good place to start. With the performance graphs and reporting included, you will be able to see pretty quickly the amount of performance increase delivered to your environment.
It seems I may have been a little premature about the cache encryption and compression part in the post and wanted to make a clarification “The cache encryption and compression are on our road map, not available yet today.”
Steve