Appliance Deployment Featured Article

Astute Networks, which provides appliance deployment solutions for storage and virtualization, has been recognized by Storage Switzerland, an analyst firm for the storage industry.

The analyst firm has recognized the Astute ViSX G4 Flash VM storage appliance deployment platform as the ideal solution to improve performance in virtual server and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.

The report titled, "A New SSD Solution for Tier 2 Virtualized Data Centers" was written by Eric Slack, senior analyst at Storage Switzerland, who touted the platform as an attractive solution for mid-market virtualized environments.

Virtualized servers and VDI increasingly rely on flash-based technologies as they help overcome the challenges of heavy I/O demands required by random data requests. However, this technology can be seen as too expensive, too disruptive to deploy, and often underutilized. According to Storage Switzerland, ViSX G4 has the ability to solve these problems making it a better fit for mid-market enterprise environments.

Astute addresses these challenges through TCP and iSCSI Acceleration, and a Network-based Performance Storage Tier. Through its patented Astute DataPump Engine, a TCP and iSCSI protocol processor, Astute maximizes Ethernet network bandwidth and random IOPS from flash without the cost or complexity of Fiber Channel. The ViSX can share flash capacity and performance across multiple physical and virtual servers, allowing VMs to be moved between hosts as workloads change.

Additionally, the ViSX Networked Flash architecture combines ultra-reliable eMLC flash modules with Astute's own custom designed high-performance, 10/1GbE DataPump Engine protocol processor to completely offload and dramatically accelerate network (TCP) and storage (iSCSI) protocol processing.

"Astute has stated their mission is to provide cost effective, high performance, simple to deploy, network-based flash appliances -- purpose-built for virtualized environments," said Slack in the research note.

He added, "The ViSX VM storage appliances, with their advanced 10Gig DataPump Engine, can provide the virtual server manager a 'drop in' performance boost to an existing SAN or NAS environment while preserving the flexibility and VM migration benefits of a shared storage architecture.”