Condusiv Technologies announced the release of V-locity 6.0, featuring Condusiv's patented IntelliMemory server-side DRAM read caching engine that is now 3X faster than the previous version due to a behavioral analytics engine that focuses on "caching effectiveness" instead of "cache hits."

V-locity 6.0 is I/O reduction software for virtualized environments that delivers as much as 600% or more faster application performance without any additional hardware.

"Typically, when a vendor is into the 6th generation of any technology, performance enhancement is incremental in nature. That status quo couldn't be further from the truth as we just released the highest performing product in the 33-year history of the company that boasts 3X faster caching than the previous version of V-locity," said Brian Morin, SVP, Global Marketing, Condusiv Technologies. "Performance bottlenecks from I/O inefficiencies are plaguing today's enterprises with an expensive and unsustainable business model of reactively buying more flash or spindles to satisfy application performance challenges. With the release of V-locity 6.0, we are ending this vicious cycle with software intelligence that cures the problem of increasingly smaller, more fractured, and random I/O that penalizes application performance."

V-locity 6.0 contains two key technologies that reduce I/O from VM (virtual machine) to storage. The first is its patented IntelliWrite engine that increases I/O density from VM to storage by adding a layer of intelligence into the Windows OS that eliminates I/O fracturing so writes (and subsequent reads) are processed in a more contiguous and sequential manner. This reduces the I/O requirement for any given workload and increases throughput since more data is processed with each I/O operation. The second key technology, IntelliMemory DRAM read caching, has achieved a performance breakthrough in V-locity 6.0 by focusing on serving the smallest, random I/O. IntelliMemory has also been enhanced with an extremely lightweight compression engine that expands the amount of data that can be serviced by DRAM without visible CPU overhead.

"V-locity version 6.0 makes a very compelling argument for server-side DRAM caching by targeting small, random I/O - the culprit that dampens performance the most," said Jim Miller, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Management Associates. This approach helps organizations improve business productivity by better utilizing the available DRAM they already have. However, considering the price evolution of DRAM, its speed, and proximity to the processor, some organizations may want to add additional memory for caching if they have data sets hungry for otherworldly performance gains."

IT Administrators who are concerned with allocating precious DRAM for caching purposes need not be concerned. IntelliMemory is a dynamic cache that leverages available DRAM and throttles according to the need of the application so there is a never an issue of resource contention or memory starvation. This allows organizations to get the most from the hardware they already have by ensuring the fastest storage media in their infrastructure is being fully utilized instead of sitting idle.

Condusiv's V-locity 6.0 with IntelliMemory DRAM read caching offers:

- Enhanced Performance – Iometer testing reveals the latest version of IntelliMemory in V-locity 6.0 is 3.6X faster when processing 4K blocks and 2.0X faster when processing 64K blocks.

- Self-Learning Algorithms – IntelliMemory collects and accumulates data on storage access over extended periods of time and employs intelligent analytics to determine which blocks are likely to be accessed at different points throughout the day.

- Cache Effectiveness – By focusing on "cache effectiveness" rather than the commodity and capacity-intensive approach of "cache hits," V-locity determines the best use of DRAM for caching purposes by collecting data on a wide range of data points (storage access, frequency, I/O priority, process priority, types of I/O, nature of I/O (sequential or random), time between I/Os) - then leverages its analytics engine to identify which storage blocks will benefit the most from caching, which also reduces "cache churn" and the repeated recycling of cache blocks.

- Data Pattern Compression (DPC) – A very lightweight data compression engine, V-locity doesn't tax the CPU with visible overhead, eliminating the need for dedicated compute resources.

"Available DRAM may not sound like a lot of capacity for caching purposes, but when you're talking about the fastest storage media possible that is exponentially faster than SSDs and sits closer to the processor than anything else, even just 4 GB allocated to a particular VM is the perfect place and size to satisfy small, random I/O that is stealing storage bandwidth. For those read-heavy workloads that have even more DRAM, V-locity will provide levels of performance unrivaled by any other caching approach that sits further down the technology stack," said Brian Morin.

V-locity has been adopted by nearly 2,000 virtualized organizations to solve their most I/O intensive challenges and is proven to dramatically improve performance in Tier I applications such as those running on SQL, Oracle, Exchange, ERP, CRM (including Salesforce), OLTP, data warehousing and analytics, EHR/EMR applications (such as MEDITECH), Business Intelligence (BI) applications, file servers, and web servers.