High Performance Applications

Blast through the bottleneck of seek bound storage

Many applications in today’s data center are “seek bound,” “disk bound” or “I/O bound.” The CPUs are idle and the response time and user load cannot be improved without buying racks of disks. The dollars are literally disappearing through the air vents.

Due to the physics of rotational media, 15K rpm disks are the fastest available.  In addition to rotating the media (4ms), a disk head is moved to seek the data (2ms). The combination of disk seek time and rotational delay causes many applications to become “seek bound” with access delays greater than 5ms and IOPS per drive less than 250.

Violin memory appliances dramatically solve the seek-bound application performance problem. Access delays can be lowered and IOPS raised by 100 to 1000 times. Applications can benefit significantly with many being accelerated by 10 to 100 times. Violin is actively partnering with software developers in application areas that include:

  • Databases and Analytics
  • Metadata servers
  • Scientific Computing
  • High Performance Storage

Memory appliances can lower access delays from milliseconds to nanoseconds and increase IOPS from thousands to millions! Violin memory appliances enable the data center to be balanced between CPU and I/O, saving millions of dollars and ensuring users get the experience they want.

Are your applications seek bound?

Application performance is typically determined by one or more major bottlenecks in the system:

  • CPU bound: The application uses all processing resources available to it.
  • Network bound: The application saturates the bandwidth of the SAN, LAN, and WAN links available or is limited by the latency across the network.
  • Seek bound: The application is limited by the performance of the storage system and specifically the latency and IOPS limits of the rotating disk storage media.

CPU and network performance have been growing at Moore’s law or faster with growth rates above 50% per annum. Disk performance has been growing at less than 5% per annum. These contrasting trends have meant that applications are increasingly seek bound where CPUs are idle and users are not satisfied.