The FlashSoft team was at VMworld Europe last week in Barcelona. I don’t want to make you jealous, but if you missed the event, you missed a great opportunity to mix with more than 7,000 virtualization professionals like yourself, in Barcelona, in some beautiful Mediterranean weather. But I digress.

I had an interview with W. Curtis Preston of Truth In IT, during the conversation, we coined a new expression: “storage of record.” I have been meeting customers and partners who describe the same dilemma: how do you improve the performance of a storage system that you can’t touch?

As we talk about in the interview, business requirements like regulatory and standards compliance, and technical requirements like backup are increasingly built into the storage infrastructure, making the storage “untouchable”. OK, not always untouchable, but it’s always a very nervous, “sweaty-palms” touch — with lot of constraints and lots of interested parties.

Riffing on the idea of a “system of record” – a familiar concept in information management – we talked abouthow a lot of IT professionals know that flash can improve storage performance, but they can’t touch their organizations’ storage systems, because the entire storage infrastructure has become a kind of system of record. And it’s not just IT that relies on this “storage of record”, it’s Operations, it’s Legal, it’s Finance.

That’s where FlashSoft software can help. Because FlashSoft implements a flash-based cache in the server, it accelerates I/O between server and storage, enabling faster, more scalable storage performance without touching the SAN or any storage systems. Without changing your “storage of record”.

See my interview here, and let us know if you’ve got a “storage of record” problem.

Peter Crosby
Product Manager for SanDisk

In the past couple of months since we launched FlashSoft for VMware vSphere, it feels like we’ve been in a whirlwind of IT industry events: the Flash Memory Summit, VMworld 2012, the Intel Developer Forum, and Oracle OpenWorld…and we’re not stopping! This week we’re in Barcelona at VMworld meeting with many of our European customers and partners.

In addition to hands-on demonstrations of FlashSoft software in our booth, our very own Peter Crosby – product manager for FlashSoft software – gave a presentation in the Solutions Exchange Theater titled: “Many Paths: Flash Memory and Virtualization.” In his presentation, Peter discussed how to understand the capabilities that server-tier flash brings to virtualization environments in particular, and the differences among various architectural approaches that have been taken to bring a solid-state caching capability to VMware vSphere. If you missed his presentation and you’d like to see the slides, just let us know.

Rich

As we’ve said earlier, this year’s VMworld was a huge event for the SanDisk FlashSoft product team. Following the launch of FlashSoft™ Software for VMware® vSphere®, this year’s VMworld event in San Francisco was our first big opportunity to share our software with virtualization professionals on a large scale.

Some of our partners and customers joined us at the event, and we have a short video featuring them speaking about their experiences with FlashSoft software, and their plans for the future. You can watch the full video here.

A few highlights:

Gary Lamb, CTO of NextCloud, talks about how increasing VM density provides a competitive advantage to a cloud services provider, and the value of the FlashSoft software integrating cleanly with the hypervisor.

Tim Russell, VP of Data Life Cycle Solutions at NetApp, discusses how working with SanDisk, NetApp can address a broader range of customer performance requirements.

Kaku Yamaguchi of SCSK Corporation describes how the company is looking to alleviate IO bottlenecks for the company’s data center customers.

Shridar Subramanian, VP of Marketing at Virident, speaks about how caching with FlashSoft keeps the benefits of shared storage, while delivering the performance benefits of PCIe flash.

Enjoy!

Rich

It’s hard to believe that it’s already time to say farewell. On Wednesday, the last day of the Solutions Exchange, our excitement was just as high as ever, though our energy may have begun to flag toward the end.

Our preparation began months ago, with our plan to introduce FlashSoft™ Software v3.0 for VMware® vSphere® at this year’s VMworld in San Francisco. Months of hectic activity ensued as our team laid out the preparation for this milestone event – the first launch of a new software product by SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions.

We arrived at the Moscone Center on a beautiful Sunday morning, where we unpacked our bags and tidied up our booth in the Solutions Exchange hall. We set up our demo stations, and checked dozens of little details, right up to the moment the doors opened at 4:00PM on Sunday.

And then you arrived.

Thousands of VMware experts from every state in the United States, and everywhere around the world poured into the Solutions Exchange. With food and drink on Sunday night, then immediately after the keynote on Monday morning, and over the next three days, we got to meet you, hear from you, and draw on whiteboards with you, to learn what you were doing to virtualize servers and desktops, and to manage them more efficiently. And we had the opportunity to talk directly with you about FlashSoft.

Some vendors go to conferences to deliver a pitch. But it is just as important for us to listen to you, to hear what you are doing with virtualization, what challenges you face, and what goals you have for the future.

At this year’s VMworld, we learned that I/O latency remains a problem, and that a server-tier solid-state cache is something you want to investigate. In some cases you’ve virtualized the low hanging fruit, but held off on certain apps where performance might be an issue. In some cases, the latest upgrade to storage infrastructure delivered the expected performance bump to most of your hosts, but you still need to boost some that are especially I/O constrained. For some of you, server-tier caching on flash is a key strategic goal, and you are already in the process of determining the right path to that goal.

Over three and a half days, we learned a lot from you. Thanks for teaching us about your operations, and talking with us about FlashSoft. Then perhaps we saw you one last time at the party on Wednesday night. Well, no need to get into that…

So we talked and listened to each other, and we scanned your badge (of course). And now we ask, are we going to build on what we learned from each other? Will we make that conversation at VMworld a starting point for an investigation of server-side solid-state caching with FlashSoft? Will we take the next step and plan an evaluation, to see how much FlashSoft can increase VM density and application performance in your environment?

Speaking for the FlashSoft team at SanDisk, I can say that we’ll do everything we can to make sure that the conversation we had at VMworld is just the start of a serious effort to help you achieve your goals for VMware vSphere.

Oh, and by the way, will we see you in VMworld in Barcelona?

Rich