Storspeed Inc. came out of stealth on Oct 2009 with its SP5000 network-attached storage (NAS) caching appliance designed to speed storage systems and report on their performance at a granular level without disrupting applications.
The SP5000 caching appliance is a 2U device containing 80 GB of DRAM and four drive slots for solid-state disks (SSDs). "We didn't want to go the Fusion-io or Gear6 route of using Flash on a card because we want to take advantage of the latest SSD technologies as they come out," said Mark Cree, Storspeed's CEO/president and founder.
Each SP5000 contains a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (1o GbE) switch and can be clustered up to six nodes with the first release. Inside is a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that gives the box the horsepower to do deep packet inspection on each packet of data sent over the local-area network (LAN) to any NFS or CIFS-connected NAS device, enabling users to set caching policies for particular application workloads, file types and individual virtual machines. The deep packet inspection also allows for detailed reporting on performance characteristics of the storage network.
The design can theoretically scale out to 256 nodes, Cree said, and Storspeed's future roadmap includes clusters of nine, 12 and 24 nodes. "There's probably no reason to go beyond 24 nodes," he added. Cree said Storspeed's internal testing showed a six-node cluster performing at up to 2 million IOPS and up to 4.2 GBps throughput.
Cree claims the differentiation for Storspeed is that it requires no changes to mount points within applications, and performs faster than Avere's and Gear6's system per appliance because it uses FPGAs and proprietary ASICs for processing rather than commodity processors. If the device fails, its internal Ethernet switch keeps applications' access to the back-end storage arrays intact.
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