InfiniteIO recently announced its new Application Accelerator. I had the opportunity to speak about the news with Liem Nguyen (VP of Marketing) and Kris Meier (VP of Product Management) from InfiniteIO and thought I’d share some thoughts here.
Metadata Is Good, And Bad
When you think about file metadata you might think about photos and the information they store that tells you about where the photo was taken, when it was taken, and the kind of camera used. Or you might think of an audio file and the metadata that it contains, such as the artist name, year of release, track number, and so on. Metadata is a really useful thing that tells us an awful lot about data we’re storing. But things like simple file read operations make use of a lot of metadata just to open the file:
- During the typical file read, 7 out of 8 operations are metadata requests which significantly increases latency; and
- Up to 90% of all requests going to NAS systems are for metadata.
[image courtesy of InfiniteIO]
Fire Up The Metadata Engine
Imagine how much faster storage would be if it only has to service 10% of the requests it does today? The Application Accelerator helps with this by:
- Separating metadata request processing from file I/O
- Responding directly to metadata requests at the speed of DRAM – much faster than a file system
[image courtesy of InfiniteIO]
The cool thing is it’s a simple deployment – installed like a network switch requiring no changes to workflows.
Thoughts and Further Reading
Metadata is a key part of information management. It provides data with a lot of extra information that makes that data more useful to applications that consume it and to the end users of those applications. But this metadata has a cost associated with it. You don’t think about the amount of activity that happens with simple file operations, but there is a lot going on. It gets worse when you look at activities like AI training and software build operations. The point of a solution like the Application Accelerator is that, according to InfiniteIO, your primary storage devices could be performing at another level if another device was doing the heavy lifting when it came to metadata operations.
Sure, it’s another box in the data centre, but the key to the Application Accelerator’s success is the software that sits on the platform. When I saw the name my initial reaction was that filesystem activities aren’t applications. But they really are, and more and more applications are leveraging data on those filesystems. If you could reduce the load on those filesystems to the extent that InfiniteIO suggest then the Application Accelerator becomes a critical piece of the puzzle.
You might not care about increasing the performance of your applications when accessing filesystem data. And that’s perfectly fine. But if you’re using a lot of applications that need high performance access to data, or your primary devices are struggling under the weight of your workload, then something like the Application Accelerator might be just what you need. For another view, Chris Mellor provided some typically comprehensive coverage here.
