Infinite I/O

I spend most of my weeks talking to VMware customers about applications that they want to perform better. It’s probably not a surprise that the majority of these conversations revolve around databases: ERP, CRM, EMR, BI, and an assortment of other fun acronyms. What’s interesting is that even the organizations who are already using high-end hardware -- including all-flash arrays -- wonder where they can find the “next big thing” to aid them in IT’s ongoing saga to deliver greater business value and help their users be more productive.

A couple of weeks ago, our Senior Systems Engineer, Jonathan Klick, presented a webinar entitled "An Architect's Guide to Server Flash."

One of the fundamental truths about storage performance is that there is a predictable curve that relates IOPS to latency. At first, latency rises gently, sometimes even imperceptibly, as IOPS rise. At some inflection point, this changes, and suddenly every incremental unit of IOPS that a system takes on results in an exponential increase in latency.

As I talk to customers and prospects, I get asked a lot of questions not just about our product, but also about the industry. The question I've been asked most often lately is blunt: "Are price drops in SSDs friend or foe for companies like yours?"

We're excited to announce the general availability of Infinio Accelerator version 3.4 today! <Humble brag> With this release, we're the first caching vendor with VMware Ready certification on vSphere 6.7 for VMFS, NFS, vSAN, and VVols. </Humble brag>

Earlier this week, our VP of Engineering, Tom Linnell, presented a webinar entitled "Redefining Storage Performance in an All-Flash World."

We've written previously about Intel's Optane cards - why to consider them, what workloads they're suited for, and how to get the most out of them with VMware. Today we'll share some initial results from our lab testing with Optane.

The recent revelations about the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities found in Intel CPUs have had far-reaching consequences. Being in the storage industry, we've been most interested in the impact that these vulnerabilities (and their fixes) have on storage.

Over at VMBlog, Tom Linnell, our VP of Engineering, answers some questions about Intel Optane. Tom has been involved in high-performance storage and computing for more than three decades, most recently at EMC. His conversation at VMBlog included his thoughts on:

It’s been over two years since Intel and Micron first announced a new type of memory called 3D XPoint.  Hailed as the next generation of storage media, 3D Xpoint was described as faster than NAND, denser than RAM, and non-volatile.