Fusion-io Upgrades Caching Software to Boost Virtualization Performance

Fusion-io (FIO) announced a new unified virtualization software solution with an upgrade of its ioTurbine software that provides improved performance and enhance the value of virtualization investments.

ioTurbine delivers the option for hypervisor caching, virtualization-aware caching in the guest VM, dynamic reallocation of cache memory during live migration of virtual machines in VMware vMotion, and unified management of caching across virtual and physical environments.

"Just as Fusion-io revolutionized storage by integrating flash in the server to bring performance closer to enterprise applications, enabling virtualization-aware caching is a significant breakthrough in intelligent virtual performance acceleration," said Vikram Joshi, Fusion-io Chief Technologist and Vice President. "As adoption of virtualization 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 optimized software to accelerate the adoption of flash in virtual environments, while giving customers flexibility and control over their infrastructure."

Through virtualization-aware guest level caching ioTurbine virtualization software provides application performance by identifying the application’s most immediate data requirements.  It supports a choice of server and storage systems, and  multiple operating systems, including VMware ESXi, Windows, and Linux. The software provides terabytes of auto-tiered caching for up to 40 times faster database performance. It maximizes hardware investments by providing double VM density and offload SAN workloads up to 96 percent in environments with a variety of read/write mixes.

Fusion ioTurbine is available as stand-alone software or bundled with the Fusion ioCache data accelerator platform for virtualization. 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.

"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 virtualization."