Startup Gear6 is getting ready to launch a new product, Cachefx, that promises to bump up the performance of any storage system by one order of magnitude or more.
How? Imagine an appliance filled to the brim with terabytes of RAM that sits at a nice vantage point in your network, between application servers and your disk drive arrays.
Add some management software capable of selecting which applications or which files need to go faster, and you can probably see where this is going. Gear6 is not divulging many details at the moment, but you can listen to the marketing-speak of their demo clip for a little more.
The first implementation of Cachefx, which is now being beta tested by some pioneering customers, will address only NFS file systems. Sorry CIFS folks, no cigar for now, but future versions should address other file systems and block storage.
According to Gear6, early customers are seeing their applications go 10 to 50 times faster, something that is difficult if not impossible to attain with traditional storage solutions. The Gear6 approach doesn't require massive and expensive hardware replacement, and should resonate well with customers approaching the physical limits of space, power, or cooling in their datacenter.
Moreover, deploying Cachefx shouldn't require any application changes: it should be like having a large virtual cache that you can flexibly assign to different tasks as needed.
Isn't such a large cache a recipe for disastrous data losses if something breaks? Possibly, but Gear6 is playing it safe in their first attempt to bring cache memory outside of the traditional server and storage arrays locations. In fact, Cachefx will accelerate only reads, leaving writes follow their usual, uncached data path.
It's difficult to make a meaningful assessment of a new solution without knowing how much it costs and without a technical blueprint to analyze. However, if the people at Gear6 have been half as good at developing their solution as they are at keeping a veil of secrecy around it, Cachefx should bring a true revolution to networked storage.
Posted by Mario Apicella on October 24, 2006 12:04 PM
