Beside VMwares vExpert program where I am part of since 4 years I am proud to announce that I am now also part of the PernixPro program by PernixData.
PernixPro™ members are an elite community of IT professionals committed to advancing FVP storage acceleration technology. By facilitating collaboration between PernixData experts and the industry’s top luminaries, PernixPro breaks down the barriers to widespread adoption of server-side storage, giving companies of all sizes a cost-effective solution for scaling storage performance independent of storage capacity.
PernixDatas main product, PernixData FVP, is a pure software based solution that creates a low latency, fault tolerant I/O acceleration tier using high-speed server-side Flash and/or Memory.
More information about the PernixPro program is available at their website.
Why PernixData?
I jumped into PernixData software because I personally think that they have created a very interesting product. Around VMwares ecosystem there are lots of great startups, but most of them are not really inventing something new, but rather focusing on existing market segments with similar software/feature sets. PernixData is in the market for about 2 years now and the software they have created is kind of unique. Co-founder Satyam Vaghani is a well-known person who was responsible for VMwares core components like the clusterd filesystem VMFS, VAAI and Virtual Volumes.
PernixData FVP...
- ...is pure Software. There is no need to buy any hardware making it very easy to implement it on any kind of environment. You can test it in Homelabs (which I think is very important if you want to evangelize a product) or in a large enterprise environment, without the need to change the entire architecture.
- ...can be deployed in less than 10 minutes without any service disruption or changes to hosts, storage, network or VMs.
- ...is hardware independent. It works with any Server, any Flash/RAM and any Storage.
- ...offers read and write acceleration with fault tolerance by synchronously replicating writes between servers. Many other caching solutions offer read acceleration only because having a write cache on a local ESXi host only causes big problems when the host crashes. PernixData FVP mirrors the write cache across multiple hosts to achieve redundancy in case of host failures.
- ...can use Server Memory (RAM) as a fault-tolerant medium for storage acceleration.
- ...can be easily removed from a platform without leaving any residues which means that deploying it into production is less risky, in case you are deciding against the product later.
- ...can be evaluated with the full feature set for 30 day without having to beg for trial keys.
- ...is also available in a free Version (FVP Freedom).