CacheBox Increases Application Performance With Next-Gen SSD Caching Software

CacheBox Inc., provider of application acceleration software that enables improvements in application throughput and processing with no disruption to a company’s compute or storage infrastructure, introduced CacheAdvance, a performance, efficient cache management solution for application-centric acceleration.

CacheAdvance is a software-only, hardware agnostic server-side caching solution that removes bottlenecks by monitoring application I/O requests and determining which data to accelerate in order to provide optimal performance and user experience. By intercepting application I/O requests intended for relatively slower HDD devices and rerouting them to faster flash devices that have a cached copy of data required by the application, it increases performance levels and reduces write amplification which positively impacts flash endurance. It is hardware agnostic and compatible with any NVMe, PCIe, SAS, or SATA flash storage.

“Organizations of all sizes not only need increased storage capacity as data volumes grow, but also improved performance to ensure that their business-critical applications are able to handle the increased workloads,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst, ESG. “The perennial challenge has been for organizations to somehow cost-effectively improve both capacity and performance. After all, replacing existing architectures isn’t always viable and over-provisioning for performance is inherently profligate. The sweet spot that CacheBox aims to address – designing an agnostic software solution that selectively accelerates application performance – is clearly one that can add business value.”

CacheBox’s approach to server-side caching impacts the storage, compute and application tiers while making optimal use of shared SSD resources for only relevant application data to ensure high and consistent jitter-free acceleration. Applications suited for optimized performance acceleration include object-based storage, big data, cloud infrastructures, transactional and analytic workloads, including MySQL, MongoDB and other data warehousing products.

CacheBox’s internal testing of CacheAdvance demonstrates performance gains ranging from 10X to 100X over HDD and within 5% to 15% of flash performance utilizing a small fraction of flash capacity.

CacheBox is led by a group of seasoned veterans with more than 100 years of industry experience among them. The company was co-founded by CEO Lorenzo Salhi, COO John Groff and VP of engineering Murali Nagaraj.

Salhi has spent more than 20 years in the flash/storage industry having previously served as VP sales, enterprise-OEM, sTec.

With 25 years in management, sales and operations, Groff previously founded and served as the managing partner at Paragon Technical.  

Nagaraj has 20 years in storage and file system architecture experience and was the lead developer on CFS at Veritas/Symantec.  

Former chief architect on CFS at Veritas/Symantec, Dilip (DMR) Ranade is the company’s CTO, while Shaloo Shalini, a contributor at Veritas/Symantec and Cadence, serves as VP of technical marketing.

“The promise of just sticking a bunch of solid state drives into an existing storage architecture and hoping that it provides the performance gains needed to overcome the challenges of application acceleration is never going to be a reality,” said Salhi. “Rather than go through the hassle and expense of overprovisioning storage or turning to all-flash arrays, organizations need a solution that optimizes application acceleration and removes the administrative burden and costs of alternative approaches. With CacheAdvance, the storage bottleneck is eliminated without costly server and storage upgrades.”

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CEO Lorenzo Salhi was at Stec for 16 years.