V-locity Server I/O Optimization Software From Condusiv

Condusiv Technologies Corp. announced V-locity Server optimization software, purposely designed for I/O-intensive applications like SQL Server and Exchange running on physical servers.

V-locity architecture was first introduced for virtual platforms, optimizing I/O at the source on guest machines, as close to the application as possible to eliminate unnecessary I/O from getting pushed through the server, network and storage environment. With the release of V-locity Server, Condusiv has applied its high performance V-locity architecture to physical server environments where many organizations continue to run their most I/O intensive applications. With I/O optimized at the source, more work can be processed in the same amount of time for greater throughput while application latency is reduced. Optimized I/O means organizations can scale – sharing servers and storage among more devices and more users all while managing their most demanding workloads and business critical data-centric applications.

I/O Performance Barriers
While storage density has advanced at 60% CAGR, storage performance has advanced at just 10% CAGR. As a result, reading and writing of data has become a bottleneck, as applications running on powerful CPUs must wait for data, forcing organizations to continually buy more storage hardware to spread the load.

With big data, cloud computing and BYOD, more data is in motion, and there is greater demand for high-speed access of that data. Organizations need to tackle the I/O problem in a scalable, cost-effective way. Even as organizations move to virtualized environments, I/O-intensive applications like SQL Server and Exchange still reside on physical servers.

"In 2013 CIO’s require improved IT performance. They can no longer afford to spend 70% to 80% of their funds refreshing and expanding existing systems. They need to be able to shift a big chunk of their budgets into growth initiatives – IT projects and programs that open new markets and new business," said Jerry Baldwin, CEO of Condusiv. "V-locity Server is leading the shift from hardware to software in solving performance issues in the enterprise. The result is business critical legacy applications that are accelerated by 50% or more while saving organizations up to 80 cents on the dollar since all that speed is delivered without disruptive and expensive new hardware."

There are two performance barriers at work:

• Windows generates unnecessary I/O traffic by splitting files upon write, which also impacts subsequent reads
• Frequently-accessed data unnecessarily travels the full distance from server to storage and back on every I/O request.

These two behaviors create an amount of unnecessary I/O that prevents data and applications from performing at peak operation.

When a system services many simultaneous requests from a number of disparate data access points, I/O bottlenecks occur. This problem is compounded by the above read and write inefficiencies resulting in an unwelcome increase in overhead that reduces server, network and storage performance. In today’s data-driven environment, there is an even greater need for cost-effective bandwidth or I/O capacity that can only be achieved through proactive software optimization.

As a first step to I/O optimization, V-locity Server eliminates nearly all unnecessary I/O operations at the OS level when writing a file, which in turn eliminates all unnecessary I/O operations on subsequent reads. As a second step, it caches frequently accessed data within available server memory without resource contention to the application to keep read requests from traveling the full distance to storage and back.

With V-locity, optimizing I/O at the point of origin, this means only productive I/O is pushed through the server, network and storage. This approach to I/O optimization compliments technologies that may already be running to promote IOPS or latency reduction, including SSDs, flash cards, SAS, etc., and provides benefit from the top-down. And since I/O is optimized at the source, V-locity Sever is network storage agnostic, providing benefits to advanced storage features like snapshots, replication, thin provisioning and deduplication.

"V-locity is like nitro for your storage. My web applications are faster; my databases respond quicker and backups transfer faster. With V-locity optimizing our environment, the amount of workload we were able to process in the same amount of time jumped 89%," said Carlo Piccini, Oracle and Affinium DBA, Bell Canada.

V-locity Server optimization software is a solution for physical server applications. Condusiv guarantees a minimum 25% performance improvement on physical server applications, or the software is free.

V-locity comes with a self-auditing benchmark to provide a ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison in real-world environment (Iometer validated by openBench Labs).

"In a server environment with FSB I/O subsystems, V-locity Server optimized Microsoft Exchange IOPS performance dramatically. Exchange was able to effectively complete 75% more transactions than without V-locity Server running on the Exchange host and the PDC server," said Dr. Jack Fegreus, founder of openBench labs.

Inside V-locity Server
V-locity IntelliMemory technology addresses read request inefficiency by caching the most active data in the server’s available memory. Should an application require that memory, V-locity serves memory back to the application to ensure there is never a case of memory starvation or resource contention.

V-locity IntelliWrite technology optimizes I/O write operations, eliminating the performance penalties associated with the Windows OS splitting files into pieces and writing each piece to a different logical location within the SAN or NAS. V-locity is aware of space allocation and aggregates writes to behave sequentially – requiring less I/O for every file written. Subsequent reads also benefit, since only minimum I/O is required to fulfill the request. As a result, only productive I/O requests are processed across the entire infrastructure, enabling more data to be processed in the same amount of time.

V-locity Server Benefit Analyzer: To see the benefits of V-locity in real-world environment, V-locity is bundled with self-auditing benchmark software (Iometer validated by openBench Labs) that provides a before-and-after performance comparison during initial deployment over a three-day period. All key metrics needed to establish a ‘proof of concept’ are report-ready, with all the empirical evidence needed to present V-locity’s results to your organization.

InvisiTasking technology allows all the V-locity Server ‘background’ operations within the server to run with zero resource impact on current production.

V-locity auto-detects storage type and optimizes itself for peak performance accordingly (SAN, NAS, DAS). Any SSD connected to a server is optimized as V-locity boosts performance while extending its lifecycle.

V-locity Server optimization software is the second product to be introduced in the V-locity product family, now joining V-locity 4 VM Acceleration software for virtualized environments including all VMware ESX/ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual platforms.

V-locity Server runs on the Intel x86/x64 platforms (including compatible CPUs from other manufacturers) on the following Windows OS:

• Windows Server 2003
• Windows 2008 Server
• Windows 2008 Server R2
• Windows Server 2012

Condusiv recommend 4GB of physical memory on servers where you install V-locity Server, with a minimum 1GB available for IntelliMemory. IntelliMemory will use somewhere between 256MB and 24GB, depending on data volume and platform configuration, whether x86 or x64 systems.