Category: PernixData

PernixData Releases FVP 3.0 For Enhanced Scale-Out Storage And Architect, Unified Analytics Platform For Applications And Storage

PernixData today announces the general availability of FVP version 3.0, the company’s product offering that enables improvements to scale-out storage capability without the addition of hardware-based storage. FVP decouples the underlying storage infrastructure from hardware to deliver scale-out storage featuring marked by low latency, improved scalability and enhanced operational agility. FVP aggregates server-side flash storage to accelerate reads and writes to storage by means of server side flash and RAM. FVP enhances VM performance by ensuring the scale-out of storage in conjunction with the computational requirements of a specific infrastructure. FVP 3.0 features support for vSphere 6.0, an enhanced user interface built via HTML 5 and PernixPlus, a product that collects data about the health of an infrastructure to facilitate the monitoring and management of infrastructures and applications.

Today, PernixData also announces the release of Architect, a software platform that delivers real-time analytics regarding storage infrastructures and virtualized applications that are agnostic of the underlying hardware. Architect gives customers aggregated business intelligence into application and hypervisor performance in ways that enable proactive management of the design and architecture of applications to facilitate optimal performance and functioning. As such, Architect delivers an unprecedented degree of granularity regarding the intersection of application performance and storage to enable holistic management of IT delivery. Taken together, today’s announcements from PernixData about FVP version 3.0 and Architect represent a huge step forward toward delivery of non-disruptive solutions for scale-out storage and attendant analytics about application and VM performance. Expect to hear more from PernixData regarding enhancements to both FVP and Architect as enterprises become increasingly comfortable using software-based solutions to improve storage scalability and application performance marked by the decoupling of storage from computational capacity.

GIW Industries Pumps up VDI Performance with PernixData FVP Software, Dell SSDs and NetApp Storage

PRESS RELEASE

Storage Acceleration Software Proves to be a Key Component of New Citrix XenDesktop Implementation

SAN JOSE, Calif. – January 7, 2015 – PernixData, the leader in server-side storage intelligence, today announced that GIW Industries, the leader in the design and manufacturing of heavy duty centrifugal slurry equipment, pumps, and parts, has deployed PernixData FVP™ software to cost-effectively optimize virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) performance by decoupling current storage performance from capacity.

GIW Industries was about to embark on a strategic VDI project using Citrix XenDesktop 7.5, however, Lucas McCuistian, the company’s IT, systems and network administrator, was worried that storage bottlenecks would jeopardize the project’s success.

“Most problems with VDI come from slow reads and writes to storage,” said McCuistian. “Given that, I was willing to spend money at the beginning of the project to avoid any storage performance problems.”

GIW Industries was happy with its existing NetApp FAS 2220 storage system, and did not want to spend $100,000 or more on a storage upgrade. The company searched for alternatives, and chose to deploy Dell SSDs and PernixData FVP software instead (at the recommendation of their trusted partner, Philotek).

“PernixData puts storage reads and writes into high speed server media for optimal VDI performance and cost effective scale-out,” said McCuistian. “In addition, we could keep our NetApp array and accompanying data services, avoiding rip and replace headaches. With a new decoupled storage architecture, we cost-effectively rolled out VDI without our end users noticing a difference in performance.”

The company plans to triple the size of its VDI environment in the coming years, with PernixData FVP software playing a key role in these plans.

“When you have software like FVP that you can install and then walk away from, it easily becomes a strategic part of your IT infrastructure,” said McCuistian. “Now that we have decoupled our storage, I cannot imagine going to any other type of storage architecture.”

PernixData FVP is a key infrastructure element of any virtualized data center. The software virtualizes server side flash and memory into a clustered acceleration tier that enables IT administrators to quickly, easily and cost-effectively optimize VM performance while scaling-out storage performance with compute resources.

About PernixData®
PernixData is fundamentally changing how storage is designed and operated in virtual data centers. The company’s flagship software product, PernixData FVP, virtualizes server side flash and memory to enable scale-out storage performance that is independent of capacity. No changes are required to VMs, servers or primary storage, ensuring maximum performance of all virtualized applications in a seamless, scalable and cost- effective manner.

Based in San Jose, California, PernixData was founded by virtualization experts and backed by industry luminaries in the software space. For more information, please visit http://www.pernixdata.com and follow us on Twitter @PernixData.

PernixData Closes $35M In Series C Funding For Its Disruptive Server Side Storage Technology

On Wednesday, PernixData announced the finalization of $35M in Series C funding in a round led by Menlo Ventures. The Series C funding raise also included the participation of individual investors in the form of Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, Jim Davidson, Managing Director at Silver Lake and Steve Luczo, CEO of Seagate Technology. PernixData’s revolutionary server-side flash storage technology allows customers to scale their storage infrastructure without adding hardware-based storage capacity. PernixData FVP delivers software-based scale-out storage capability based on the aggregation of RAM or flash for any virtualized application. PernixData’s disruptive scale-out technology enables IT administrators to decouple storage capacity from its underlying hardware infrastructure toward the end of scaling storage capacity without intrusive additions to storage hardware.

The announcement of PernixData’s Series C funding comes hot on the heels of the company’s July 31 news of quarter over quarter revenue growth of 42% in its first full fiscal year. To date, PernixData claims over 200 paying customers for its FVP product in more than 20 countries. With an extra $35M in the bank, PernixData lies poised to consolidate its impressive early traction in the use of serve side flash to improve storage scalability and performance. Expect PernixData to continue leading the revolution in the decoupling of storage capacity from hardware-based storage capacity as its flagship FVP product expands its market penetration and continues its maturation in collaboration with customer feedback. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, Lightspeed Ventures, Lane Bess, Mark Leslie and John Thompson also participated in today’s Series C round, which brings the total capital raised by PernixData to $62M.

PernixData Enhances Its Software Solution To Improve Storage Performance

Today, PernixData announces enhancements to PernixData FVP, its software-based storage solution for enabling dramatic improvements in the scale-out storage capability of IT infrastructures without the addition of hardware-based storage resources. In its initial rollout, PernixData FVP used hypervisor software to aggregate server side flash to create a “scale-out data tier for the acceleration of primary storage.” The aggregation of server side flash creates a clustered acceleration tier that enables improvements in application latency and storage performance. The clustered acceleration tier empowers application administrators to optimize application performance without changing the workflows or raw storage capacity of the infrastructure in which the application is deployed. Installed into the hypervisor kernel within minutes, PernixData FVP enables the scale-out of the storage capacity of a specific IT infrastructure without the hassle and expense of adding additional storage capacity to ameliorate storage performance issues.

As a result of today’s announcement, PernixData FVP can accelerate any virtualized application by aggregating both RAM and/or flash. The hypervisor’s ability to create an acceleration tier based on RAM and flash expands the number of use cases in which the PernixData solution can be deployed by extending the solution to a more diverse range of IT environments and budgets. Moreover, the solution can now be deployed with file, block or direct attached storage, thereby ensuring its ability to integrate into a wide range of storage environments and infrastructures. Satyam Vaghani, CTO and co-founder of PernixData, remarked on the significance of the product’s enhancements as follows:

Storage is at an amazing inflection point where performance is being extricated from capacity to optimize application behavior and cost effectively scale IOPS, without disrupting years of investment in shared storage infrastructure. By making FVP easy to deploy in any environment, and robust enough to accelerate any virtualized application using flash or RAM, PernixData is making decoupled storage architectures the de facto standard in virtual data centers.

Vaghani comments on the PernixData FVP’s ease of deployment in almost any environment and ability to decouple storage capacity from hardware-based storage capacity. As such, the solution represents a non-disruptive approach to scale-out storage via a disruptive technology that stands to transform the economics and operationalization of storage and application lifecycle management. Today’s announcement also extends the solution’s ability to support existing replication and disaster recovery processes by allowing administrators to define which host machines take part in replication groups. Customers can designate sets of host machines for replication, thereby enabling fault tolerance amongst the machines within the replication group. Overall, today’s announcement points to a significant advancement in FVP’s ability to integrate with more diverse set of storage environments and position the technology strongly for greater adoption in the industry. PernixData has signed over 100 customers since its general availability announcement in August 2013 and appears poised to rapidly expand further given FVP’s newly released ability to support almost any server and storage configuration.

PernixData Releases PernixData FVP For SMBs; Selected As Finalist In “Best Technology” VMware 2013 Awards

PernixData continues to build on its momentum in the server side flash virtualization space. On Tuesday, the company announced a brand of its PernixData FVP software catered for small to medium-sized businesses. The SMB PernixData FVP creates a clustered acceleration tier for the virtualization of server side flash on up to four hosts, allowing for scale-out storage independent of hardware storage capacity. SMBs can now take advantage of PernixData’s disruptive technology that seamlessly installs into an organization’s existing IT infrastructure. The SMB edition of the PernixData FVP means that the company is now aggressively pursuing the enterprise, SMB and startup market in a strategy that appears intent on determining which vertical will deliver most sustained traction subsequent to its general availability announcement in early August.

Meanwhile, at VMware 2013, PernixData FVP was named one of the finalists in the “New Technology” category of the Best of VMware 2013 Awards. PernixData’s VP of Marketing, Jeff Aaron, commented on the VMware award by explaining the platform’s innovation as follows: “While other vendors offer point products that deliver modest storage performance gains for a limited number of use cases, PernixData FVP provides a true clustered solution that seamlessly benefits all virtualized applications. This makes PernixData’s software a key infrastructure element of any virtualized data center.” PernixData FVP installs into the hypervisor kernel within 20 minutes, without the necessity of VM or server changes or reboots.

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.