sTec, Inc

Cost-Effective Application Acceleration

While IT organizations have embraced the benefits of solid-state technology, many server environments cannot afford to replace all of their hard disk drives (HDDs) with SSDs to increase performance and scalability. For these enterprise server environments, EnhanceIO is a solution that runs beneath the application layer, enabling applications to utilize the performance benefits of SSDs without major IT infrastructure changes.

The Case for SSD Caching

Expense is the key reason that IT managers give for not moving their data to SSDs. This is because many IT managers focus most of their attention on price per gigabyte. On average, a gigabyte of SSD-based storage costs about twenty times that of HDD-based storage. Converting an HDD array to the same-sized array of SSDs would be cost-prohibitive.

Software Components

An SSD cache can yield most of the benefits of switching from HDDs to SSDs at a fraction of the cost of an all-SSD system. A cached system typically operates on less power than an HDD-based system of similar performance, and that creates a side benefit by reducing cooling requirements. An SSD cache can also extend the useful life of an existing system by improving performance to meet growing demands through an incremental investment, rather than through a wholesale upgrade/replacement of the existing system.

Caching also enables faster access to the data without the extra storage administration overhead to acquire and install new disk shelves, configuring new LUNs and migrating data to the new LUNs. Caching is almost transparent and requires little if any downtime.

Benefits

• Hardware Independence – EnhanceIO is independent of hardware and accelerates any host disk volume.
• Platform Independence – EnhanceIO has been designed for Windows Server and Linux Server environments.
• Block Level Acceleration – EnhanceIO accelerates I/O blocks that have been cached in the SSD.
• Versatility – EnhanceIO can accelerate multiple HDDs and/or volumes that are being accessed by the host upon which it is installed.Minimizes server resource overhead, ensuring availability of server resources for application use
• Metadata Storage – Metadata for the cache is stored in system DRAM rather than in an SSD for the fastest possible mapping of cache pages.
• Cache Block Size – EnhanceIO supports a block size of 2K, 4K (default), or 8K bytes.
• Performance Profiler – EnhanceIO’s Performance Profiler can monitor an application’s workload and guide the administrator to an economical configuration with accelerated I/O performance.