Sold-state drives are rapidly gaining in popularity in the enterprise, but they require a different way of thinking to make the most of the drives’ potential. These are drives based on memory, not spinning media, which means they handle data differently than traditional hard drives.
One thing that needs to be changed is the controllers. Using a traditional hard disk controller on an SSD is akin to putting Windows 3.1 on a quad-core computer. So, InfoStor reports on a startup called Panzura that is launching new controller for SSD drives used in cloud environments.
Panzura launched today with the introduction of the Application Cloud Controller (ACC), an application-aware device based on solid-state disk (SSD) drives that functions as a read/write cache to eliminate latency in cloud storage environments.
The SSD drives deliver performance that Panzura officials claim exceeds the performance of tier-1 storage arrays, but it’s the application awareness that differentiates the ACC from other caching or acceleration devices, according to Randy Chou, Panzura’s president and co-founder.