Gear6 Unveils Industry's First Terabyte-Scale Caching Appliances to Accelerate Data Intensive Applications

Gear6, accelerating storage for real time application performance, today unveiled the CACHEfx line of scalable caching appliances, the worlds first terabyte-scale caching products that dramatically accelerate response times and throughput for a wide variety of demanding, cross-industry enterprise applications. Available now, CACHEfx appliances complement existing network attached storage (NAS) by centralizing a massive pool of coherent memory that serves data 10-to-50 times faster than mechanical disks, eliminating I/O bottlenecks and hotspots. Gear6 centralized storage caching solutions deploy transparently in the data center to preserve current infrastructure, applications, file systems, and storage management software. Leading enterprise organizations are deploying the broadly applicable centralized storage caching solutions from Gear6 to achieve these significant performance gains, protect existing investments, avoid over-provisioning, and guarantee high quality-of-service. more »

Gear6 Joins Forces with Independent Oracle Users Group and Oracle Partner Network

Gear6, accelerating storage for real time application performance, today announced that it has joined the Independent Oracle Users Group and the Oracle Partner Network and will showcase solutions to increase database performance at Collaborate07, April 15-19 in Las Vegas, Nevada. more »

Gear6 Named as Finalist for the Red Herring 100 Award

Gear6, accelerating storage for real time application performance, today announced that it has been named as a finalist for the Red Herring 100 Award, a selection of the 100 North American private companies playing a leading role in innovation and technology. The Red Herring editorial board diligently surveyed the entrepreneurial landscape throughout the North American region and identified the top 200 companies, out of more than 800 under evaluation that are leading the next wave of innovation across multiple technology sectors. more »

What is Centralized Storage Caching?

Centralized storage caching innovatively applies well-known caching concepts to modern data center architectures by keeping frequently accessed data in a very large central memory pool instead of on traditional mechanical disk drives. This enables high performance data access by avoiding time-consuming disk operations and accelerates applications due to dramatically decreased response times and increased data throughput. more »

Analyst reports on centralized storage caching

Enterprise Management Associates Research Brief: Gear6's CACHEfx Appliance Optimizes I/O for Critical Commercial Applications As server speeds soar, many commercial IT sites find critical applications have become I/O-bound. Solutions relying on traditional mechanical storage have been unable to provide a solution due to the physical limitations inherent in disk I/O. Gear6s new CACHEfx caching appliance uses high performance memory to complement existing disk-based storage, keeping highly used data in random access memory that is accessible to any process using NFS. more »

Taneja Group Technology Brief: The Business Case for Centralized Storage Caching We believe that centralized storage caching offers a killer value proposition - an order of magnitude better performance (for both IOPS and access times) coupled with a non-disruptive approach that complements existing storage infrastructure. more »

Recent news coverage on centralized storage caching

InfoWorld: Startup skirts datacenter bottlenecks with cache Gear6 CACHEfx's cache-in-a box approace serves data quickly to I/O-heavy apps. more>>
Byte and Switch: Gear6 shifts into caching Gear6 is earmarked to solve some tough problems. more>>

Enhancing
Storage Performance
with Greg Schulz,
Storage IO (18 min)

• How About My Snapshots? A reader asked about how he would use caching in conjunction with snapshots. To best address this question, and numerous others we expect to receive, we decided to preview the design philosophy behind our CACHEfx appliance.
• Blog Watch - Gear6 spotted Anil Gupta posted an interesting exchange he had at Storage Networking World with a Gear6 user. Read his conclusions on the product based on that conversation.
• Terabyte Shipments Hitachi announced shipments of their new terabyte drive this week. It is great to see the industry moving along at an impressive clip on the capacity front. However, we still need to ask questions about how to get information to and from those drives quickly and efficiently.