Software-Defined Storage: Driving a New Era of the Cloud
With the arrival of memory as a persistent form of storage, managing which applications actually get to take advantage of this relatively expensive resource has become a bigger IT priority.
To address that challenge, CacheBox today introduced CacheAdvance, a tool for monitoring application I/O requests that then applies that information in a way that ensures that certain applications get higher levels of priority to memory access than others.
CacheBox COO John Groff says that unlike other caching tools, CacheAdvance is designed to allow IT organizations to manage access to shared memory resources at a more granular application level. IT organizations, says Groff, can reroute I/O requests for a particular application to Flash storage devices that have a readily available cached copy of the data being requested. At the moment, CacheBox has developed drivers for Linux environments with plans to add drivers for Windows Server.
Groff says that CacheAdvance is designed to not only eliminate the need to over provision IT infrastructure resources in order to meet application requirements, but also to give IT organizations more dynamic control over how those resources are invoked.
Groff says that the latest advances in processors have created a mismatch between the speed at which processors can operate and the speed at which traditional magnetic storage operates. Flash memory, in the form of faster solid-state disks (SSDs), fills in that gap. The challenge facing IT organizations is figuring out how to dynamically allocate those resources based on the performance requirements of specific applications.
