PernixData Launches Software Solution To Virtualize Server Side Flash

Today, PernixData announces the availability of PernixData FVP, the industry’s first hypervisor for server side flash. PernixData FVP virtualizes and aggregates server side flash to enable dramatic improvements in scale-out storage capability. Based on a software solution, PernixData’s revolutionary technology enables dramatic improvements in scale-out storage without transformation of the storage infrastructure. PernixData’s virtualization of server side flash delivers enhanced read and write storage performance by means of a “clustered acceleration tier” that conglomerates server side flash to enable improvements in scale-out storage and performance. The solution currently supports VMware-based virtualization and plans to accommodate additional hypervisors in subsequent releases.

Chad Currier, IT director at Cardinal Innovations Healthcare Solutions, summarized the innovation of the product’s software-based storage solution as follows:

Storage I/O bottlenecks are consistently the root cause of many of our application performance issues. In the past, our only recourse was to add additional storage capacity, which is a costly and time-consuming endeavor that does not always solve the underlying performance problem. With scale-out storage performance, PernixData enables us to finally stop throwing hardware at our storage performance problems.

Currier notes how PernixData’s server side flash hypervisor allows customers to take advantage of software solutions to the problem of increasing scale-out storage instead of costly and cumbersome hardware-based approaches. PernixData FVP aggregates server side flash across a networked infrastructure as illustrated by the graphic below:

In an interview with Cloud Computing Today, CEO Poojan Kumar and VP of Marketing Jeff Aaron noted how the solution runs across a network of host virtual machines such that, “if every host in the cluster has a flash device, then the I/O for the VM will be accelerated with either the local flash device or (if the data is on another host) with a network access to the other host’s flash device.” The solution reduces application latency and allows for dramatic improvements in scale-out storage performance that are independent of storage capacity. To date, PernixData has raised $27 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Venture Partners and was co-founded by VMware veterans CEO Poojan Kumar and CTO Satyam Vaghani.