Last week I had the privilege of attending the NetApp Insight event in Las Vegas, along with Tom Matson, Channel Sales Manager for FlashSoft software. NetApp® has a rich history of delivering game-changing technology and it was clear from the Insight event that they are still at it, particularly in solid-state caching technology. It was awesome to see the number of sessions covering flash technology and server-side caching.
SanDisk is a NetApp Advantage Alliance Partner. Our partnership with NetApp helps us bring SanDisk’s FlashSoft™ software to enterprise, mission-critical applications that require server-side caching to meet their requirements for high-performance storage. FlashSoft software leverages enterprise flash to reduce I/O latency. This reduction in latency is a key enabler for increased performance and scalability for databases, enterprise applications, and virtualization environments.
In my conversations with NetApp Insight attendees, a couple of key points that resonated were our hardware independence and our agentless design.
Hardware Independent – FlashSoft is designed to work with any solid-state technology, whether from SanDisk or another vendor. Our open approach allows customers to select the flash hardware best suited to their specific needs. This flexibility was a key requirement for many of the people I spoke to at Insight.
Agentless Design – A second point that resonated with attendees is the fact that our software is agentless. This is critical in virtualized environments, where a single host can run multiple VMs. Being agentless means that no software is installed in the VM. In an enterprise environment that may have hundreds of virtualized hosts running thousands of VMs, installing agents in each VM introduces management overhead that admins want to avoid. Because the FlashSoft design is agentless, agents in VMs are simply not an issue. Installation on a virtualized host is straightforward, and users begin realizing caching benefits immediately.
We are excited to be working with NetApp to deliver solutions that allow customers to better meet the demands of the enterprise data center.
Victoria
