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Astute is the leading provider of performance storage
appliances for physical and virtual environments that increase performance,
enhance user productivity, and lower IT costs.
The company's ViSX
family of Networked Flash appliances is based on a 100% solid state flash
technology that cost–effectively delivers a high number of sustained IOPS
to dramatically increase application performance. Powered by its patented
DataPump Engine™, ViSX overcomes performance limitations by
non-disruptively delivering shared performance to all servers and virtual
machines over Ethernet networks. As an iSCSI attached device, ViSX is primarily
focused on mid-market customers and is available through the company's network
of authorized AstuteNet channel partners. Headquarted in San Diego, Ca, it's
largest investors are Samsung Ventures, Tallwood Venture Capital, Narra Venture
Capital, and ICCP Venture Partners.
see also:-
Astute
Networks - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com,
Astute's SSD blog
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In February 2009 - Astute Networks
launched a
SAS compatible SSD
Storage Blade for use with Sun
servers.
In May 2011 - among other things - Astute Networks was
marketing a 3U SSD accleration appliance for VMware - which offers 4.8TB of
iSCSI compatible storage.
In April 2013 - Astute Networks
launched new models in their ViSX family of
fast-enough iSCSI
rackmount SSDs - which have upto 45TB of raw SSD storage in a 2U rack which
with
dedupe enabled
can deliver $2,000 / TB and even with dedupe switched off - comes in at about
$5,000 / TB while being able to offer more than double the IOPS of much higher
priced competing SSD systems. |
Enterprise SSDs
- the Survive and Thrive Guide
Legacy versus New
Dynasty in Enterprise SSDs
7 SSD types will satisfy all
future enterprise needs
Rackmount SSDs - open
vs proprietary architectures
what do I need to
know about any new rackmount SSD?
Bottlenecks in the
pure SSD datacenter will be more serious |
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MLC flash in
enterprise SSDs
Enterprise
SSDs - Survivor Guide
what do
enterprise SSD users want?
High Availability
enterprise SSD arrays
Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated
Pools of storage
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| "iSCSI used to be a
yawn zone for SSD developments. But no longer. These 6 companies are worth
knowing about if you have any iSCSI related plans. |
| Editor:- June 10, 2013 -
iSCSI SSD market | | |
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| ...Next on the SSD world
domination agenda - create better value in the cost sensitive iSCSI market |
Editor:- April 23, 2013 - The iSCSI market hasn't been a
fertile business development ground for SSD sales - a factor which I ascribe
to the mood prevailing at its birth.
At the start of 2001 - when
the idea of iSCSI first attracted interest on the web - the
storage market was still in
a recession which would continue for another 2 years. Users could buy new
or little used servers and storage recycled from the spending spree of failed
dotcom companies for next to nothing. There was already a proven fast way of
doing fast network storage - fibre-channel
which had been around since
1994 (but it was complex to set up). Those various factors meant that iSCSI
evolved - by necessity - into a cheap, simple to set up and maintain storage
ecosystem for frugal applications which needed data.
Although there
was nothing hard wired into the technology which prevented it from being scaled
up - most of the early attempts by vendors to nudge iSCSI into the fast lane
with dedicated hardware accelerators failed. There was no real customer
appetite in the iSCSI base to encourage vendors to push for fast random IOPS
or low latency. iSCSI was the frugal way of doing complicated network
storage.
That's another reason why - prior to 2013 - none of the top
10 enterprise pure SSD array companies started in iSCSI. There wasn't enough
market demand for the kind of low latency and fast IOPS which could open enough
doors for SSDs in storage cabinets to make it worthwhile. Instead, most of the
iSCSI arrays which have been in the market until recently were originally
developed around technology optimized for FC SAN or were simply iSCSI HDD
arrays with some SSDs thrown into some of the bays. When you saw "iSCSI"
on the datasheet of a fast SSD you knew it had most likely been added
to a model which had already been optimized for another market.
You
could say that iSCSI has been a safe haven for enterprise
hard drives - because
whenever there has been a tension in the feature set between the cost of
incremental capacity versus the value of incremental performance - it was cost
- and getting the cost down as low as possible - which usually won.
I
explained in my Petabyte
SSD roadmap article a few years ago why one day - even the mantle of low
cost per raw terabyte wouldn't be enough to protect delinquently slow and
ineffcient hard drives from being evicted from enterprise network storage
racks. And this culture shock will be knocking at the door of the iSCSI market
from various different vendor directions in the coming year - with increasing
urgency.
I was pondering these factors last week when I was waiting to
dial Len
Rosenthal, Senior VP Marketing Astute Networks who
wanted to talk about the
launch
of new models in their ViSX family of fast-enough iSCSI rackmount SSDs -
which have upto 45TB of raw SSD storage in a 2U rack which with
dedupe enabled
can deliver $2,000 / TB and even with dedupe switched off - comes in at about
$5,000 / TB while being able to offer more than double the IOPS of much higher
priced competing SSD systems.
The first thing I asked about was the
company's iSCSI accelerator chip - which is one of the two technology factors
which give them an edge in iSCSI. I had heard about it many years ago - but the
company doesn't say much about it now. Len told me they were now on the 3rd
generation of their iSCSI accelerator chip. The 1st generation had been
designed for a US Navy project to enable fast access to embedded storage
located around a ship while using COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) servers and
storage.
In Astute's current ViSX systems I think you can view the
iSCSI accelerator as being the technology which buys the time (in latency cost)
which can then be spent on dependable real-time dedupe.
Len told
me that although Astute have always known this gives them a theoretical
performance advantage compared to competitors who use similar types of flash -
it's only when he engaged Demartek
to do some comparative testing recently and gave them a free hand to explore
the differences - that they realized just how good their systems were. (I've
seen summaries of these benchmarks - and they do confirm the advantages of the
iSCSI silicon.)
Astute's new systems do now seem to offer a hard to
beat SSD package for users in the mainstream iSCSI market. Len described
this as "making flash affordable for the mid market."
Astute's
earlier generations of iSCSI flash were too expensive for most users. But the
current generation - not only offers attractive pricing - but comes with proven
technologies - and cost effective replication - by what the company calls
"high
availability groups" (pdf)- which enables users to choose which
systems provide failover clustering - and whether that's local or remote. In
addition to providing data continuity when things fail - this scheme can also
provide load balancing and imporved performance in the normal (unfailed)
state.
One of the things which came across clearly from talking to Len
is that Astute Networks is totally focused on the iSCSI SSD market. They
know the market, they know the apps - and they aim to be one of the leading
suppliers in this niche. For them iSCSI isn't something on the tick list - it's
the whole list. | | |
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