PernixData has announced today the General Availability of both their flagship products, FVP 3.5 and Architect 1.1.
For those not familiar with PernixData technology, FVP is is the world’s first, and only, enterprise-class, server-side storage intelligence platform, embedded in the hypervisor to provide reliable I/O performance enhancements to virtual machines (VMs) on existing primary storage. In a nutshell, PernixData FVP virtualizes server-side flash and server RAM across all hosts, connecting the high-speed server-side resources into existing VM I/O paths, to transparently reduce the IOPS burden on a storage system, de-facto decoupling storage capacity and performances accelerating any VMware based application. Architect provides real-time analytics (descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive) for optimal storage and VM design, acting as a proactive, strategic data center management tool that continually generates new data based on dynamic VM and infrastructure conditions.
Today’s release is not simply a “bugfix” one, but introduces architectural changes and new features. The biggest change is the move from the old Windows based Management Server model to an OVF one. It is still possible to install FVP/Architect on a Windows VM (or upgrade an existing installation), but the future is in the OVA based appliance, simple to install (and in the future, upgrade). This relieves the end user from having to license and maintain a Windows VM and a MSSQL server, since the platform now runs on a Linux based VM backed by the Postgres DB. FVP and Architect can be enabled using their respective licenses on the same appliance.
Other interesting new features include:
- FVP support for accelerating physical and virtual raw device mapping (RDM) LUNs (with some limitations)
- A search box on the FVP Dashboard makes it easy to find a particular FVP Cluster in a large deployment.
- For read and write operation reporting, instead of reporting just an average acceleration rate for combined reads and writes, the acceleration rate now displays separate information for read and write operations.
- PDF reports for easier portability (Architect).
- Blacklisted VMs are ignored in working set calculations (Architect).
- Clickable data points on the VM Performance Plot redirect you to VM performance data (Architect).
All the info about the new release are of course available from PernixData’s website.
I will soon install and test the new release in the HomeLab, so stay tuned for a test drive blog post.