CacheIO, Start-Up to Discover

CacheIO LLC is building "Open Symmetrix."

Symmetrix is this high end EMC storage that has proprietary hardware and 1TB DRAM cache and is super fast. Symmetrix is what made EMC EMC².

Problem is that other than large enterprises with deep pockets, not many customers can afford Symmetrix and end up with lower end slower products.

Wouldn’t it be cool if someone can build a faster storage than Symmetrix with standards based components so every customer can afford it? This is now not only possible with the advent of new technologies such as battery backed DRAM, 1TB SSDs, and IB.

All that is missing is an intelligent caching software:
that can manage billions of data objects and their usage across DRAM, SSDs, and HDDs
that is aware of SSD’s write cycle limitation and reduces writes to SSDs by thousands of times
that achieves greater performance out of standards based components than their specifications
efficient in direct memory access and granularity locking as it it can maximize the power of the fast interconnect (18 x 8GFC ports and 48 x 6G SAS links in 2RU)
that can deliver 140Gbps bandwidth to media applications and one million IO/s to transactional databases.

CacheIO is building and delivering this software.

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Start-up CacheIO LLC, born last year in Mason, NH, claims to be able to build with standard-based components and its software an affordable open Symmetrix, the high-priced high-end storage system from EMC, using new technologies such as battery backed DRAM, 1TB SSDs and IB.

This software is supposed to manage billions of data objects across DRAM, SSDs and HDDs, is aware of SSD write cycle limitation and reduces writes to SSDs "by thousands of times", and maximizes the power of the interconnection with 18 x 8Gb FC ports and 48 x 6Gb SAS links in 2U units. The company stated that it delivers 140Gb/s bandwidth to media applications and one million IO/s to transactional databases. Not bad.

Two products are offered by CacheIO with its software.

FA140

The Flash Array FA140, in RAID-5 or-6, scaling up to 48TB on 60GB to 1TB SSDs and consuming 400W, is a solution for 4K/8K media production. It has been deployed at Hollywood studio MTI Film, tested against 4K applications, and managed by shared file system Quantum StorNext. The studio acquired a 20TB device, shared by the facility's 32 various digital film workstations, enabling real-time streaming of up to nine concurrent uncompressed 4K streams at 140Gb/s, with no performance loss due to the fragmentation suffered by traditional HDD-based systems.

FC1000

cacheio_fc1000_540

The Flash Cache FC1000 increases throughput of an existing SAN "up to 100 times". It shares the same platform with FA140 - 48 x 6Gb SAS links and either 18 x 8Gb FC ports or 5 x 56Gb IB ports. With close to 800GB battery backed DRAM and 48TB SSDs, it delivers one million IO/s at 4KB and lowers write latency from 20ms to 2μs, according to CacheIO. FC1000 cluster virtualizes two appliances into one cache for twice the read cache size and write cache mirroring protection.

The three founders of CacheIO, Bang Chang, CEO, Bruce Mann, CTO, and Steve Dalyn, chief software architect, come from SeaChange International that developed one of the first all-flash server and caching software and sold its broadcast server and storage business to XOR Media in May 2012.

Prior to SeaChange, Chang was product line manager at EMC, responsible for next generation storage architecture and strategic acquisitions. He was instrumental in EMC's acquisition of VMware, Legato, and Documentum and formerly held various engineering positions at Auspex, pioneer in NAS, and Alphatronix, a start-up in HSM.

Mann was senior technologist at DEC where he developed IP-based storage, predecessor to today's NAS and SAN.

Now with all-SSD systems, relatively standardized hardware and the same connectivity (but Ficon for mainframes), it is possible to approach the performances of an EMC Symmetrix VMAX - that can also integrates SSDs - but without reaching the same huge capacity (3PB for VMAX 20K model).