Just this past Monday Infinio announced the general availability of the third iteration of their performance enhancing software, Accelerator 3.0. If you haven’t heard of Infinio I would certainly recommend checking them out – They are one of really only a few companies providing true server-side caching for virtual machines. On a side note one interesting fact about Infinio is that they actually came out of stealth during a Tech Field Day presentation – a pretty cool entry if you ask me!
Accelerator 3.0 marks the third major release from Infinio since they entered the market in 2013 – with each bringing something new and exciting to the table. So what’s new this go around? – A few things caught my attention…
Built on VAIO
Along with vSphere 6.0 U1 came something called VMware VAIO, or more specifically vSphere APIs for IO Filtering. This is essentially a framework – a framework provided by VMware allowing for third party vendors to insert their technology directly into an IO stream of a VM. As you can imagine disrupting the I/O stream of a VM could potentially have performance implications. By utilizing VAIO, third parties are now able to do this is in a safe and certifiable manner – using API calls and technology that is supported by VMware. Accelerator 3.0, from what I can see is one of the first products to be certified on and utilize VAIO. It should be noted however that even though VAIO was available with vSphere 6.o U1, Accelerator 3.0 requires vSphere 6.o U2!
VM-Level Acceleration
The Infinio I/O filter gets installed onto each host within your cluster, which then in turn provides acceleration on a per-VM basis, rather than accelerating complete datastores. This type of functionality is also completely integrated within the Storage Policy-Based Management functionality – For instance with VVOLs we are able to dictate via policy which type of disk our VMs sit on along with many other array provided technologies they utilize – in addition to this Infinio Accelerator will allows us to attach policies to determine the cache properties and acceleration of these VMs.
Memory and SSD
Infinio has always been known for their use of server RAM for an acceleration medium. In addition to this, Accelerator 3.0 gives customers the choice to offload cache to local SSDs and PCIe/NVMe flash as well, all the while supporting the acceleration of any type of storage be it SAN, NAS, DAS, VSAN, VMFS, vVOLs, etc. In the end we have somewhat of a tiering effect for cache – RAM being the primary and as data is aged it flows down to flash – allowing us to have fast performance for primary cache while having an option for a larger cache size.
While these were the features that certainly grabbed my attention its the performance that Infinio is highlighting. Through it’s early adopters of Accelerator 3.0 Infinio has seen 1 Million IOPS per host, coupled with an astounding 20GB/sec of throughput!! If you are interested in learning more about the product I suggest that you jump onto one of their 30 minute demos that they offering – with the next one occurring on June 23rd @ 1PM EST. Also, if you need a little literature before hand you can also pull down the product whitepaper! More of a hands on type of person – get your hands on a 30 day free trial here! Infinio has always stressed that they are a risk free product – in the past I’ve installed and removed Infinio into live production environments without experiencing any downtime whatsoever – and I’m sure things haven’t changed with this release!
