Dataram is doing a good job of keeping everyone interested in their new storage product; they provided some more details today. I think my earlier suspicion that they want to compete with Density Dynamics might be wrong; from the information they currently disclose I think their product might be completely different.
“As we prepare to launch a data storage acceleration product, we have studied the current state of solid state storage appliances very carefully to understand the strengths and weaknesses of available solutions,” said Jason Caulkins, Dataram’s Chief Technologist. “The features, benefits and hidden compromises the customer must accept with today’s generation of solid state storage appliances are not always obvious. We hope to help our customers understand all their options and provide them with a much better solution.”
My best guess at this moment is that their new product will be a caching appliance that can be inserted transparently between a storage system and the clients; probably only for NAS devices at first, since I think that will be easier to implement. I’d also guess that the appliance and the included software will automatically detect data hotspots and cache only data that is accessed frequently.
Unfortunately for Dataram, several employees of Storspeed have already applied for a patent that appears to cover this exact technology:
A method, system and program are disclosed for accelerating data storage by providing non-disruptive storage caching using spliced cache appliances with packet inspection intelligence. A cache appliance that transparently monitors NFS and CIFS traffic between clients and NAS subsystems and caches files using dynamically adjustable cache policies provides low-latency access and redundancy in responding to both read and write requests for cached files, thereby improving access time to the data stored on the disk-based NAS filer (group).
We’ll have to wait a couple of weeks to be sure; but I strongly suspect that the new product will be something along these lines.
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[...] finally launched their “mystery product”; it turns out I was on the right track with my predictions about this last month: My best guess at this moment is that their new product will be a caching appliance that [...]
[...] fact, the product is exactly what I earlier thought Dataram would offer; a cache that sits between your traditional NAS filers and clients accessing it. Both models offer [...]