Intel® Cache Acceleration Software

Prioritize Application Performance

I/O acceleration for the workloads that matter

Intel® Cache Acceleration Software combined with Intel® Data Center Family SSDs is an industry unique solution that delivers application specific performance on physical servers and virtual machines via Selective Optimized Caching.

Application performance is being held back by storage speeds.

Today’s multi-core, multi-CPU servers are held back by storage I/O that cannot keep up with ever-increasing demand, preventing systems from reaching their full performance potential. Traditional solutions of adding more storage, servers, or memory, adds huge expense, as well as management complexity.

Intel has the answer – software that installs on the server and uses fast SSD/Flash media to cache “hot” data, eliminating I/O latency and driving targeted application performance from back-end storage via intelligent caching, not extreme spending.  

Transparently Accelerate Applications

Intel Cache Acceleration Software seamlessly accelerates targeted applications running on virtual machines and physical servers. No migration effort or storage and/or application configuration needed.

Intel Cache Acceleration Software drives significant performance improvement and more concurrent users and VMs on I/O intensive applications such as Microsoft* SQL Server, Exchange, BI Applications, and more—running on dedicated servers and VMs, including support for vMotion and/or Live Migration while maintaining a hot cache.

Application Specific IOPS

Intel Cache Acceleration Software has industry unique Selective Optimized Caching capabilities, allowing administrators to target storage performance directly to the applications and data that really need it—the precise applications that add the most value to the company. This policy management provides fine-grained control of what is cached, down to the application or file level, and in some cases even down individual database tables.  

Increase Storage Performance, Decrease Latency

Intel Cache Acceleration Software transparently accelerates any storage. Utilizing local or remote shared SSD/Flash for caching, Intel Cache Acceleration Software provides huge performance gains at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions such as large-scale storage migration or over-provisioning HDDs.

Intel Cache Acceleration Software is a win-win with previous storage spends. By offloading IOPS from primary storage to the servers themselves, over-provisioned spindles can be redeployed to handle upcoming capacity needs.

Multi-Level Caching

Intel Cache Acceleration Software provides cooperative integration between the cache on Intel SSD and the server DRAM cache, creating a multi-level cache that optimizes the use of system memory and automatically determines the best cache level for active data—allowing applications to perform faster with Intel CAS than running fully on SSDs. The Intel solution provides an optimized multi-level caching capability for your most demanding workloads.

Increase VM Density

Intel Cache Acceleration Software optimizes how VMs access storage. By providing local storage I/O, Intel Cache Acceleration Software removes one of the main limiters to the number of virtual machines that can be supported per physical host—lowering the enterprise cost per virtual application. 

Intel Cache Acceleration Product Specifications

Platform support:

• 64-bit Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2*
• 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux* 5/6, CentOS 5/6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11* SP1
• VMware, Windows Hyper-V*, KVM, Citrix XenSever*

Storage requirements:

• Any primary storage device including SAN, local disk, RAID, iSCSI, or Fiber Channel, and so forth
  

Flash/SSD requirements:

• Validated and supported on the Intel SSD Data Center Family (including Intel SSD DC S3700 series and Intel SSD 910 Series) directly attached or remote

Application support:

• Any I/O intensive applications, including databases, Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint,* transactional web servers, and so forth
  

Management user interface:

• Graphical user interface to manage included and/or excluded data acceleration and overall cache operation