StorSpeed presents direct competitor for Avere FXT series caching appliances

Caching for NAS and SAN systems has been a hot topic the last few days. Late last month Dataram presented their XcelaSAN appliance that sits between a Fibre Channel SAN and the clients accessing it, storing data in RAM. A couple of days ago, Avere Systems announced the FXT series of NAS caching appliances using both RAM and traditional SAS disks. And yesterday, Storspeed launched their own solution: the SP5000 NAS cache.

The SP5000 offers 80GB of RAM, and has 8 2.5 inch SAS slots that can be used for either traditional HDDs or Solid State Drives. Like the other two units, it will dynamically cache the most-accessed data, allowing the use of relatively slow SATA-based NAS appliances as backend storage. It connects to theses using 1 or 10 Gbps ethernet ports.

While these appliances are all very innovative, I highly doubt this new niche will exist for long. Other “traditional” storage companies are working hard to integrate similar features into their own storage products, removing the need for these separate devices. Examples are EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering, the NetApp Performance Acceleration Module, and BlueArc’s Data Migrator.

So for now, if you’re in a bind and need something to accelerate your storage without breaking the bank, the starting price of around $65000 for these appliances is quite reasonable. But the marketing departments of these companies have their work cut out for them; the potential market for these products isn’t all that big, and the established players are all touting their own acceleration products.

Related posts:

1. Dataram launches SAN caching appliance
2. Avere Systems shows first benchmarks
3. Dataram gives more details about their mystery product
4. Solid-State Storage Appliances Make Good Business Sense
5. Network-Attached Storage: it’s not just for Ethernet