Virident’s FlashMax II PCIe solution has some of the best performance available in the industry and the company is enjoying big wins in what’s often called the “hyper-scale” market. These are large service providers, social media and web-based giants that have developed their own scale-out architectures using commodity server and disk storage hardware. Virident has also been selected by two large vendors as the flash OEM for their high-end storage solutions.
Virident is now focusing on opening up the enterprise IT space for flash. The message to CIOs is that server-side flash isn’t just for the ‘lunatic fringe’ user, more general (albeit high performance) IT environments are good candidates as well, especially server-side flash. One of the ways they’re looking to do this is to replace some of the solutions that mainstream IT environments have traditionally used to run big Oracle and SQL environments.
The Hyper-Host alternative
If Virident’s original environment was the hyper-scale market, enterprise IT might be called the “hyper-cost” market, populated by high-dollar solutions from most of the major storage vendors. To do this Virident has developed a software suite called FlashMax Connect that is allowing companies to use server-side flash in tier-one shared storage environments. It uses Infiniband connectivity between server nodes but will be available with 10Gb Ethernet later in the year as well. FlashMax Connect consists of three software components, vShare, VHA and vCache that are designed to bring the performance benefits of server-side flash to traditional networked storage environments in a cost-effective way.
vShare
By providing block-level, shared flash access across devices, vShare brings SAN-like benefits to servers with or without FlashMax II, or any internal flash resources. It gives users the ability to pool flash across nodes using RDMA and provide capacity beyond what a single box can hold. vShare can scale up to 24TB per server and can scale out by adding more server nodes.
Companies can set up a high performance, shared storage environment and run Oracle RAC, for example, getting performance characteristics that look like Exadata, at a much lower cost – and no commitment to Oracle for storage.
VHA
VHA provides synchronous replication between server nodes for an active-passive failover. With it users can build a highly available single instance of Oracle or SQL running vMax PCIe cards and it’s easily integrated with clustering solutions from these database vendors.
vCache
vCache provides write-through, write-back and write-around options when using this shared pool of server-side flash as a cache front end for a SAN or NAS environment. Compared with putting flash into these kinds of networked storage systems this solution offers significantly more performance and can improve flash endurance as well. And, since vCache is tied into the flash translation layer on the FlashMax cards, it gets better performance than other caching solutions that run in kernel mode or on the server OS.
Storage Swiss Take
Flash has become a standard solution in the highest performance environments and Virident’s FlashMax II has captured a significant share of this hyper-scale market. But besides web-based companies and large service providers, more mainstream IT environments have a lot to gain as well from the use of these kinds of flash solutions.
One way Virident is approaching this market is by enabling enterprises to pool their server-side flash resources and share them across the data center, as they currently do with their Tier-1 SAN and NAS systems. With technologies like FlashMax Connect, companies have an affordable, highly-available alternative to these high-cost storage systems, one with the ability to provide caching as well.
Eric is an Analyst with Storage Switzerland and has over 25 years experience in high-technology industries. He’s held technical, management and marketing positions in the computer storage, instrumentation, digital imaging and test equipment fields. He has spent the past 15 years in the data storage field, with storage hardware manufacturers and as a national storage integrator, designing and implementing open systems storage solutions for companies in the Western United States. Eric earned degrees in electrical/computer engineering from the University of Colorado and marketing from California State University, Humboldt. He and his wife live in Colorado and have twins in college.
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