CacheIQ Rises From The Ashes Of StorSpeed

While I've gotten used to the vulture-capital-drivencreative destruction of companies in the tech business, even I sometimes get whiplashat how fast the VCs will eat their young. While cloud storage gateway vendor Cirtas is the latest example, NAS cachingstartup StorSpeed set a new land speed record coming out of stealth in October2009 and blowing up just five months later.  Now StorSpeed founder Greg Dahl, and a newexecutive team, have re-entered the market as CacheIQ.

The founders of CacheIQ--including NetQoS founder JoelTrammell and sales wiz Keith carpenter, in addition to StorSpeed survivor Dahl--havetaken StorSpeed's basic concept of a network protocol-oriented read cache forNFS traffic and adopted it to run on commodity hardware. This avoids the costs, andlong production/test cycles that custom hardware like StorSpeed was usingentail.

CacheIQ's RapidCache joins products from Avere,Alacritech and Violin Memory in providing an external cache for NFS traffic such as VMware hosts and Oracle databases. Theseother caching systems mount the back-end storage system via NFS and present anew mount point to the servers and/or users that are accessing the data. While this allows the vendors to add additionalFAN (file area network)-style NAS virtualization, like Avere's new global namespace, it also somewhat complicates the configuration.

Instead of terminating the NFS connections, CacheIQ insertsits Flow Director, a 24-port 10Gbps Ethernet switch, in the data path betweenthe user systems and the back-end storage. The Flow Director "sniffs" the data passing on non-NFS traffic and referringNFS traffic to the cluster of data servers that store the cache. A typical RapidCache installation has a pairof redundant Flow Directors and up to eight data servers. Each data server is asix-core Westmere-based server with 144GBytes of RAM and up to 3.2TBytes of flash SSDscreating a two-tiered caching architecture.

Should the data server(s) fail, the system just forwards alltraffic to the back-end storage as a switch. In fact, you can even have someaccess go through the RapidCache and other access, like backup traffic, bypassthe cache. The system checks the back endfor updates, like client-side caching does, so users accessing data from thecache don't get stale data. And, since it doesn't cache writes, there aren'tquestions about whether the data on the back end storage is up to date. I'm intrigued by the whole external caching market and amglad to see a new player with a different approach. I wish CacheIQ good luck.