Fusion-io delivers Intelligent Virtualisation Performance Acceleration

“Just as Fusion-io revolutionised storage by integrating flash in the server to bring performance closer to enterprise applications, enabling virtualisation-aware caching is a significant breakthrough in intelligent virtual performance acceleration,” said Vikram Joshi, Fusion-io Chief Technologist and Vice President. “As adoption of virtualisation is at different stages at different companies, ioTurbine provides customers with the option to cache in the guest VM or the hypervisor. Caching at the guest brings performance to the application where it is needed without costly and ineffective storage sprawl. Fusion ioTurbine makes it possible to further streamline the stack with optimised software to accelerate the adoption of flash in virtual environments, while giving customers flexibility and control over their infrastructure.”

Fusion ioTurbine simplifies the deployment of virtualisation performance through dynamic cache allocation during live migration of virtual machines, even across heterogeneous servers. With options for guest VM, hypervisor, and physical server caching, IT professionals can simplify their investment in virtualisation, whether they are just starting to virtualise a traditional datacenter or are well on their way to a fully virtual infrastructure. Unified management of physical and virtual environments further simplifies performance provisioning, enabling IT professionals to spend more time on strategic business requirements.

Unique to ioTurbine, virtualisation-aware guest level caching delivers application performance by identifying the application’s most immediate data requirements. Guest VM caching optimises the use of flash bandwidth by retaining and caching data critical to application performance.

"Fusion-io is extending the ioTurbine caching technology to include the option to cache on physical servers, in the hypervisor, and the guest virtual machine, while preserving the ability to support native vMotion," said David Floyer, Wikibon Chief Technology Officer. "This unified approach gives leading deployment flexibility and control to enterprise users requiring high performance cache in the migration to total server virtualisation."

As a flexible platform, Fusion ioTurbine software allows enterprises to work with the server and storage systems of their choice, including Fusion ION Data Accelerator and the Fusion-io NexGen hybrid storage system. Fusion ioTurbine software supports multiple operating systems, including VMware ESXi, Windows, and Linux. The software also includes Fusion ioSphere monitoring software for local monitoring of multiple deployments of the software throughout a datacenter, as well as a plug-in for VMware vSphere to provide unified management across physical and virtual servers.

Fusion ioTurbine virtualisation software provides:

• Breakthrough Application Performance: Terabytes of auto-tiered caching provide up to 40x faster database performance with maximum efficiency and minimal management, enabling IT professionals to easily control performance and spend more time on strategic business requirements;

• Options for Hypervisor or Virtualisation-Aware Guest VM Caching: The option for intelligent caching in the guest VM uniquely brings performance closer to applications to streamline data requirements. The option to cache in the hypervisor enables enterprises and cloud service providers to deliver dynamic, high performance caching while meeting service level agreements;

• Unified Caching Across Disk, Volume, File and VMs: Unified choice in caching across virtual and physical servers, guest VMs, as well as in the hypervisor, simplifies the delivery of performance across environments in all stages of virtualisation adoption;

• Transparent vMotion Support: Support for asymmetric server configurations further accelerates the software defined datacenter with completely transparent support for vMotion, high availability, VMware snapshots, and VMware vSphere dynamic resource scheduler (DRS) without the need for manual vMotion scripting or pre-allocating identical caches across servers;

• Dynamic Cache Allocation and Provisioning: Automatic rebalancing of cache capacity from live VMs accommodates newly deployed or migrated VMs, and dynamically provisions all available cache capacity to live VMs when VMs power off or migrate from the host, efficiently utilising full cache capacity.

• Maximise Hardware Investments, Reduce Storage Sprawl: Double VM density and offload SAN workloads up to 96% in environments with a variety of read/write mixes to maximise virtualisation productivity while extending the lifespan of storage investments and offering choice in IT platforms.

Fusion ioTurbine is available as stand-alone software or bundled with the Fusion ioCache data accelerator platform for virtualisation. The ioCache platform features 750GB of Fusion ioMemory capacity for ultra low latency application acceleration. The ioTurbine software caches data to the ioCache platform for rapid processing of critical application data, while non-critical data moves across the network to slower, high capacity storage arrays.