IO Turbine came out of stealth last week with a software product that identifies hot data and uses solid state drives on the physical server to create a write-through read cache. The VMware-specific implementation provides file, volume and disk drivers in the ESX guest host, as well as a VLUN driver in the hypervisor.
This approach provides the ability to share the cache resource between each virtual machine (VM) running on a physical server, and is much more efficient than trying to do the same thing downstream in the primary storage system because the hypervisor VLUN drivers, combined with the ESX drivers, have a detailed knowledge of the access pattern of each VM.
The architecture is clever from an operating system deployment and application standpoint. Applications and operating systems are transparently modified to go through the Accelio drivers for storage. The drivers can automatically determine which physical drives are SSD from the VMware management data and create the read cache without storage administration. The Accelio management console further allows establishing levels of service available to each guest host by allocating the amount of cache it gets. Another advantage is that the type and amount of SSD, be it HDD form factor or on PCIe is irrelevant.
VMware users will also note that VMotion between physical servers is also supported by this architecture, providing the flexibility of a pool of physical servers that share a common primary storage system with similar caching abilities. While the first release of Accelio is VMware specific, the architecture provides a base for incorporating into other hypervisors in the future.
IO Turbine was founded by Silicon Valley storage veterans Rich Boberg and Vikram Joshi, formerly of NetApp and Oracle, and has venture capital backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Merus Capital, Andy Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton. Accelio is available for beta testing.
The product is expected to be available for $2,000 to $3,000 per physical server.
