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DataCore Announces UpTempo
November 2007 by Marc Jacob
DataCore Software announced that it has released new versions of its UpTempo performance accelerators designed to dramatically boost the performance of Microsoft Windows Server Platforms and their applications. The server versions of UpTempo™ can dramatically speed up Microsoft Exchange, SQL Databases, Virtual Servers, Citrix, Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) and other File and Disk I/O Intensive Windows Server Applications. UpTempo dramatically speeds up applications by making the computer system read and write data to its disk drives more efficiently. It does this by overcoming today’s biggest performance barrier – data input/output (I/O) bottlenecks resulting from slow, mechanical, disk accesses – the most common cause of server and desktop application underperformance. List prices for UpTempo start at $49 for XP systems and $498 for Windows 2003 Server systems.
CPU advances have followed Moore’s law for many years – now roughly doubling in speed every 18 months. Memory technologies have gained ground almost as quickly. In sharp contrast, hard drives have taken over 10 years to double in speed. This widening gap in performance makes the rotational and seek time latency of hard drives the biggest performance bottleneck in modern computers.
– Advanced disk block cache, a sophisticated "virtual" I/O controller that sits below the file system
– An I/O scheduler
– A combination of very advanced mechanisms for increasing the performance of local I/O
– A set of predictive self learning and workload aware algorithms
– A general schema for reducing exception overhead for disk I/O
– Software that sits ’below’ the Windows file system and improves its performance
– Simple-to-use and automated software, requiring no application knowledge from the user
Mileage may vary! But, speed ups by a factor of 3 to 4x I/O performance (and sometimes 10x or more) are not uncommon. It depends on how much applications are constrained by I/O bottlenecks.
