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FalconStor Software (NASDAQ: FALC) and Violin Memory have combined storage virtualization and flash-based solid state drive (SSD) technology to accelerate the performance of storage area networks (SANs).
The FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator combines FalconStor’s Network Storage Server (NSS) Gateway and storage management software with a Violin 1010 PCIe-based Flash Memory Appliance to create a virtual SAN with a solid state memory array tier as a caching platform for application data requiring the fastest I/O.
FalconStor released an ERP system benchmark of the NSS SAN Accelerator that showed that a solid-state layer of just one percent of a SAN’s total storage capacity can more than double SAN performance while slashing processing time by more than half.
Fadi Albatal, FalconStor’s vice president of product marketing, said the offering is “extremely cost effective,” and bests competitors’ offerings by offering full acceleration for both reads and writes.
Violin Memory claims 220,000 sustained random write IOPS and 350,000 for read for its 1010 solid state memory appliance.
The NSS SAN Accelerator also boosts read and write performance through two features of FalconStor’s storage management software: SafeCache and HotZone.
SafeCache allows a segment of the solid state memory array to be devoted to application writes so that all disk writes can be received and acknowledged with low latency. The data is then written transparently to storage volumes on the SAN.
HotZone accelerates the read process of random-access database applications by monitoring disk access patterns and then copying the hot data to a HotZone cache on the solid state memory array for faster read access. When the data is no longer heavily used, the data is deleted from the cache and referenced back to its original location in the SAN to make room for other active data.
FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator starts at $32,000, which includes one solid state memory array with 500 gigabytes of RAID-protected storage capacity.
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