Gear6 Shifts Into Caching

Gear6 has finally shipped the caching appliance it's been promising for over a year, revealing an intriguing device with a whopping pricetag. (See Gear6 Shifts Out of Neutral.)

Gear6 says its new Cachefx, which accelerates NAS devices by caching files from RAM, is already shipping and in production with six customers. The device operates in the data path on an Ethernet link (with support for 10 Gbit/s) between NAS filers and storage. Current capacity is 256 Gbytes, with plans to scale to 5 Tbytes.

The goal of Cachefx is to improve performance of NFS file delivery on disk-based NAS systems. A version of the product supporting block-based storage such as iSCSI is on the roadmap, Gear6 says.

Gear6 claims the appliance can deliver 250,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS), 2-16 Gbit/s throughput (thanks to compression developed in house and with open-source tools), and microsecond response time.

Customers using Cachefx can always revert to a cacheless state. "Direct access without caching is always available," says VP of marketing Gary Orenstein.At press time, customers weren't available for comment, but one is quoted in today's press release: "We expect centralized storage caching from Gear6 to dramatically improve the response time of our software by increasing effective file server throughput, particularly during periods of peak utilization," said Peter Reiss, SVP of technology at the D. E. Shaw Group, an investment and technology development firm. The firm has no financial interest or investment in Gear6.

One thing: If you want this product, prepare to pay: Its starting price is $400,000.

Gear6 is earmarked to solve some tough problems, though. It's aimed at situations where sheer performance and acceleration are required to support high-transaction environments -- places where overprovisioning has typically been the stop-gap measure. Gear6 has development partnerships with Oracle, Network Appliance, and Sun.

"The server/storage performance gap is widening," says Orenstein. Large data sets, random access, the use of concurrent clients, lots of transactions, high peak loads, and SLA requirements are all contributing to the need for better response time and storage throughput, he says. Gear6 sees the solution in RAM. "We prepose caching, not a virtualization of I/O components," Orenstein asserts.

The comment is a swipe at potential competitor 3Leaf, whose new product virtualizes I/O to provide a pool of virtual disk and network connectivity across multiple x86 commodity servers. (See 3Leaf Sprouts Up.) Other potential competition comes from solutions that improve NAS performance with controller-based cache and solid-state disk. There are also some practical approaches that can help boost response time. (See Responding to Poor Response Time and How Do I Boost Response Time?.)Gear6 says its differentiator is supporting clustered file systems. At the same time, Orenstein says some users will be able to add Gear6 and not have to move to a clustered file system at all.

As with any performance-related product, results of using Cachefx will vary. To help, Gear6 offers an "acceleration readiness" tool called Nemo that records NFS activity on a particular system in order to recommend settings that could improve throughput. Mainly, Nemo depicts for prospective customers just how cache is dealing with NFS.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch