Gear6 Shifts Out of Neutral

Gear6 isn't completely out of stealth yet, but the startup put some flesh on the bones of its technology story today and gave an indication of what it is doing with the $14.5 million in funding it has raised. (See Gear6 Unveils Appliance and Gear6.)

Gear6 says it is beta-testing a storage caching appliance and expects to release it in the next few months. The first appliance it rolls out will accelerate NAS devices. Plans are underway for a block storage appliance to follow.

Here's what we know: The Gear6 device will sit in the data path on an Ethernet link between NAS filers and storage. It will use high-speed RAM to increase the rate of I/O.

Here's what we don't know: How well it will work, how much it costs, and product specs such as how many terabytes it will scale to.

Here's what Gear6 promises: The appliance will serve cache files 10 to 50 times faster from RAM than is possible from disk. Gear6 says its appliance scales better than server or controller-based caching devices, does not cause a performance hit on each server, and does not require the additional cost of memory cache in storage systems.We also know there appears to be a market for any product that can significantly bump up performance of NAS. (See The Outer Limits of NAS.) That's what Gear6 claims it can do, especially if performance rather than capacity is the issue. In theory, a Gear6 appliance can help a single NAS device perform as well as a cluster of dozens of NAS systems.

Gear6 CEO Tom Shea says the idea is to use memory to save companies from having to buy more disk.

"People are buying more storage than they need," Shea says. "I don't believe more spindles is the long-term answer. When it comes to IOPs, RAM is cheaper than disk storage. With high-speed RAM, we can scale to multiple terabytes and handle many requests in parallel. We're using memory to rebalance the data center."

Shea sees his ideal customer as a shop with "tens of terabytes of NAS running applications critical to the business and running into a few limitations performance-wise." He also says it is useful for smaller enterprises that heavily rely on transactional databases.

"This is not a niche technology," he insists. "We think it will be very mainstream."Gear6's main competition comes from cache built onto controllers and emerging solid state disk also designed to speed the transfer rate for I/O-intensive applications. (See Solid State for Small Biz, Solid State Seeks Solid Ground, and In Depth: Solid State Storage.)

"The easy approach is to put more cache on your controllers, but if you can't afford it or that controller can only support so much cache, you hit a limit," says Greg Schulz of StorageIO Group. "This will take the burden off the cache on the controller, so that cache can be used more effectively. With solid state, you need to identify where the problem is, where the file is you need to move, and move them. That takes time."

Of course, it's impossible to say how well Gear6's appliances perform yet. Any device that sits in the data center will have latency. The question is, how much?

"It's how effectively, and with how little overhead you can get over that data path," Schulz says. "You shouldn't be adding latency, you shouldn't be adding complexity. Is it a single point of failure? How will it interoperate with other things in the data center? Those are what you have to look at."

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch