According to CRN, IO Turbine, a storage startup company, has released software that takes advantage of SSD and Flash storage on servers, increasing the performance of primary storage in virtualized server environments. Overcoming bottlenecks caused by multiple virtual machines sitting on clustered physical servers which are trying to access NAS or Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN storage, IO Turbine’s new Accelio software is initially being released for VMware environments, but will be available for other environments in the future.
“’We’re addressing the I/O bottleneck by enabling Flash memory in virtual systems,’ Boberg said. The proliferation of multi-core processors has made it easy to increase the number of virtual machines per physical host, but in the process has increased per-host I/O demands, Boberg said. ‘This has led to a very high I/O demand on storage networks,’ he said. At the same time, the gap between CPU performance and disk drive performance is widening, Boberg said.”