The software allows the use of server-based flash storage (and other memory technologies) as the performance tier of storage infrastructure based on NetApp Virtual Storage Tiering.
Principal technologist John Martin told iTWire that his company has been working on the technology for over four years, and Flash Accel gives "better than tier-1 performance".
Flash Accel works with any vendor's PCI-e flash memory or SSD devices, and would also work with other persistent technologies such as phase-change memory.
The software runs within VMware, intercepting calls from the virtualisation software to the filesystem and caching the data in as much as 10TB of flash storage.
"It's an automatic storage tiering technology," said Mr Martin, adding that it offloads over 90% of read activity from the storage arrays.
This means fast and expensive drives can largely be replaced with cheaper, higher-capacity units, and deduplication is possible without negatively affecting application performance.
Flash Accel is aware of what's happening on the storage arrays (eg, the restoration of a snapshot) and therefore is able to maintain cache coherency between the array and the server.
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This also means Flash Accel can be used in conjunction with VMotion to pre-warm caches for failover.
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