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Enmotus, Inc., a California-based developer of innovative software-defined storage acceleration solutions, is announcing general availability of its FuzeDriveTM Server software for Windows and Linux. This new class of software-defined storage acceleration allows storage appliance and converged platform builders to provide all-flash performance to their storage array, without the full cost of an all-flash storage system, utilizing off-the-shelf solid state devices (SSDs) and storage class memory (SCM).
FuzeDrive utilizes Enmotus’ proprietary MicroTieringTM storage algorithms to automatically load-balance data across different storage devices. This enables FuzeDrive to overcome performance limits, fast-tier capacity limits, and CPU loads that today’s caching software approaches commonly experience. The enhanced features of FuzeDrive give IT pros greater flexibility, such as file pinning that is integrated into the operating system’s native file-browsing tools, and greater visibility and control over important data that is provided by its unique at-a-glance visual mapping tools.
According to Andy Mills, CEO and co-founder of Enmotus, “Today’s SSD caching approaches have allowed data center system builders to accelerate servers with minimal disruption, but as SSDs grow in capacity and newer SCM devices come on line, we are now starting to see limits on how fast cache architectures can operate. We believe our non-caching approach to accelerating servers will revolutionize the way data centers are built, especially as hyper-converged environments in both premise and cloud are increasingly adopted.”
FuzeDrive is the first software-based solution that optimizes both capacity and performance at block device level in direct attached storage (DAS) systems. DAS is increasingly becoming the primary storage configuration used in clustered servers, and almost exclusively with hyper-converged servers, resulting in significant cost reductions as compared to storage area networks (SANs). Featuring an ultra-low latency storage hypervisor, combined with intelligent block-level statistics and a policy-based load balancing engine, FuzeDrive is able to break through the CPU loading and storage capacity barriers that are commonly encountered with caching software solutions.
Caching software can often impose limits on the size of the fast tier’s capacity, as higher capacities require more CPU cycles to execute the cache management tables and algorithms. This often consumes more than 50% of the host’s CPU cycles in high traffic configurations.
FuzeDrive, on the other hand, is able to operate consistently across any fast tier capacity, utilizing no more than a few percent of the host CPU’s cycles, allowing for the creation of dramatically larger fast tiers. This results in the ability to support a much larger number of virtual machines on a single converged server-storage node, and creates the ability to fully accommodate much larger files (such as high-resolution video).
Additionally, the MicroTiering algorithms are designed to permit the fast tier’s capacity to be seen as part of the overall storage that is presented to the applications and/or virtual machines. This allows for significant improvements in the cost-per-usable terabyte for each server, which is especially beneficial as 1TB (and larger) SSDs are entering mainstream usage.
Marshall Lee, CTO and co-founder of Enmotus, states that “Even SSDs are becoming bottlenecks in some cases. As a result, newer classes of storage devices continue to appear that can take advantage of higher performance busses inside servers, NVDIMMs being a great example. By utilizing a storage hypervisor approach, our FuzeDrive software is able to easily virtualize and manage such devices, creating a seamless way for data center managers to move up the storage acceleration curve with minimal impact and thereby preserving their investment.”
Enmotus is presently working with select channel and storage solution partners to make the FuzeDrive technology available. You can view the Enmotus press release announcing the server version of FuzeDrive in its entirety here; and you can view the FuzeDrive Server product page at the Enmotus website here.
Lots of companies in this space now; I think they are really going to have to compete to show potential customers what makes them better. It seems like every week I learn about a new company coming up with flash/HDD hybrid storage solutions. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Also, you either have all-flash storage or you don’t. There is no such thing as all-flash performance when some of your data is stored solely on HDDs. If that data is infrequently accessed, you might have NEAR flash performance, but the way it’s phrased is specifically a lie.