With the second major release of AutoCache, Proximal Data has taken steps to go cross-hypervisor and cross-storage platform. With 2.0 they can accelerate in NFS, iSCSI and Fibre channel environments as well as provide a performance boost to Hyper-V environments. In addition AutoCache now provides pre-warming of cache resources on virtual machine migrations as we detailed in our product analysis on the 2.0 release.
In our latest white board video from VMworld 2013 we discuss Proximal Data’s progress over the last year as well as taking a deep dive on some of the new features in 2.0.
Proximal Data’s AutoCache provides transparent acceleration of virtual machines without making any operational changes to the hypervisor environment. They commonly see customers report an increase of 2x to 3X in virtual machine density per host. That means when AutoCache is installed, one or two less hosts need to be bought and added to the environment. When you consider the cost of those hosts and the cost of additional VMware licensing, the ROI on AutoCache can be significant.
With the 2.0 release of the AutoCache Proximal Data rounded out the product and added one potentially game changing feature that may solve the VM migration issue. First, 2.0 supports all storage types; NAS, Block, and DAS. It also includes a new reporting engine that can provide cache utilization statics. This data is helpful to know when to buy more cache resources and to use for charge backs.
The big news is how well Proximal Data handles a VM migration. Again we detailed this in our product analysis. In short pre-warming will detect a vMotion event and make sure that the cache meta-data is in place at the target host. This means no performance loss on a migration while the cache analytics have to re-run on the target host.
Finally, AutoCache 2.0 no longer requires a reboot to be installed. This makes initial testing much easier and of course production rollout smoother.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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