With more application workloads being run directly in memory, managing all the different forms of memory that can be used as persistent storage is shaping up to be the next data management challenge.
To address this issue, PernixData has raised an additional $35 million in funding to help drive the adoption of its PernixData FVP software, which allows organizations to manage DRAM and Flash memory running on servers as a form of unified persistent storage.
Jeff Aaron, vice president of marketing for PernixData, says that with the cost of DRAM and Flash memory continuing to fall, more organizations are looking to run everything from virtual machines to entire applications and databases in memory. The challenge these organizations face is that they don’t have storage-management software in place that is designed to use manage memory as a form of persistent storage.
In the case of virtual machines, Aaron says that organizations using PernixData FVP software will see a ten-fold increase in performance without having to alter those virtual machines in any way. In fact, PernixData claims there are 120,000 virtual workloads worldwide already making use of PernixData FVP software.
The degree to which traditional storage vendors will respond to the continuing shift of tier-one storage to the server remains to be seen. But as this phenomenon continues to occur, it’s becoming clear just how secondary traditional disk-based storage systems are becoming.