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  5. Dataram's XcelaSAN Caches Block I/O: Page 2 of 2
Data Centers

Dataram's XcelaSAN Caches Block I/O: Page 2 of 2

We've started thinking of flash based SSDs as the mainstream go-fast solution for applications starved for random I/O performance, but today's SSD solutions require storage administrators to relocate your hot data to the small amount of SSD you can afford. Wouldn't you rather just drop a magic acceleration appliance in your SAN that makes everything faster? Dataram hopes you do.
Howard Marks
September 29, 2009

The best SSD solutions can relocate hot blocks of data from spinning disk to SSD on a sub-LUN level, but even Compellent's automatic storage tiering or promised EMC's FAST only do so once a day as a scheduled process. A cache like XcelaSAN can accelerate VDI workstation startups in the morning and then reuse the same cache to accelerate the end of day batch processes in SAP in the evening, without a SAN admin making changes or writing scripts.

Naysayers will retort that caches have been of limited value speeding up random I/O to databases in the past, and that for the $65,000 Dataram wants for an XcelaSAN, users could buy significantly more than 128GB of flash, even at EMC's prices.

Truth is, to speed up truly random I/O you need a huge cache but most business apps aren't that random, and an XcelaSAN has a pretty big cache  (four times the cache of a Clariion CX-4 960). Plus, you can add an XcelaSAN to your existing SAN over the weekend even if you, like me, are running arrays too old for flash SSD upgrades.

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