The appliance aims to deliver high-speed SAN acceleration at a price point attractive to SMB clients.
Storage acceleration and virtualization innovator SANRAD introduced this week what it’s calling “the first front-loadable, PCIe-connected FLASH module.” The module incorporates eight parallel lanes of FLASH storage bridged to eight lanes of PCIe gen 2. The module is available in 1/2TB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities.
“Our appliance delivers high-speed SAN acceleration at the lowest possible cost, due to our shared SAN caching over embedded FLASH,” says SANRAD CEO Oded Ilan. “With our approach to FLASH acceleration, the FLASH resource is shared among multiple servers, delivering the highest utilization per GB FLASH.”
The front-panel installation of the design enables simple maintenance and upgradeabilty in the data center. It also enables a “pay as you grow” approach, accommodating the addition PCIe FLASH modules on the fly, which is ideal for SMB clients.
The FLASH modules are an integral part of the SANRAD V-Switch XL storage acceleration appliance, which delivers application-based SAN acceleration over embedded FLASH. SANRAD’s policy-based caching software uses the modules as a large cache to accelerate key applications in virtualized environments.
The modular design for both FLASH and networking enables the V-Switch XL to accommodate a density of 4 TB of FLASH, together with 2×10 GE networking and 2×8 Gb FC, all in a 1U rackmount appliance. The 2U rackmount appliance accommodates five FLASH modules and one networking module, delivering 10 TB of Flash.
“In data centers and cloud environments, load distribution is not even across all compute nodes, and therefore introducing dedicated FLASH HBAs within every server is far from optimal,” explains Ilan. “By deploying high-speed SAN caching using FLASH and PCIe connectivity, a centrally located appliance can maximize FLASH by servicing multiple physical and virtual servers.”
