Company Updates

Fluid Cache for DAS 1.0 — enabling our customers’ potential

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This week, Dell is announcing the initial release of our Fluid Cache application acceleration technology, Fluid Cache for DAS 1.0.  This offering combines innovative Fluid Cache software, our award-winning PowerEdge servers with Express Flash PCIe Solid State drives, and optional PowerVault storage to deliver dramatic performance improvement for Linux-based applications. 

At Dell, we know that one of our customers’ key IT challenges is getting their applications to run faster and perform better. Due to this, our long term engineering and acquisition strategies have focused on how best to address these challenges.  As a result of these years of effort, Dell is perfectly positioned to address mission critical application acceleration due to the inclusion of our exclusive Express Flash PCIe SSD infrastructure available on select PowerEdge 12th Generation servers.  Express Flash provides a front-accessible and hot-swappable high performance storage infrastructure localized within the server itself, providing the hardware foundation necessary for Enterprise-class serviceability and availability.  But hardware is just part of the story- the innovative software technology at the heart of Fluid Cache was the result of Dell’s acquisition of RNA technologies.  By taking the best internal engineering and marrying it with the best available acquired technologies, Dell’s Fluid Cache offering brings together the best of both worlds.

There are a number of application acceleration solutions available on the market today, but Fluid Cache delivers unique advantages. As the name suggests, Fluid Cache for DAS boosts performance by creating an ultra-high-speed caching pool.  Accelerating both data reads and writes, Fluid Cache delivers performance that is simply not available from read-only caching solutions.  Using Fluid Cache, we can increase the concurrent users of a database by over 60% while at the same time doubling the number of transactions per second.  This allows your business to address seasonal spikes in online transactions, significant new user onboarding, or any organizational challenge quickly, easily and cost effectively.  And by journaling and replicating all data in cache, Fluid Cache can reduce database average response times by up to 95% without compromising data integrity.  This combination of performance and reliability not available from other solutions make it perfect for the critical applications at the core of your business, such as the Oracle OLTP databases at the heart of many ERP or CRM systems.  Fluid Cache is application independent, requiring no code changes or tuning, and can scale across additional Express Flash drives as application needs increase with no hardware downtime, utilizing familiar PowerEdge servers and the same management tools you use today.

Our Fluid Cache technology exemplifies what Dell is focused on delivering for you – solutions that:

  • Deliver great performance without compromising reliability,
  • Are quick and easy to deploy and manage, and;
  • Can scale with you as your needs change over time. 

Just like the Dell Processor Acceleration Technology we introduced for financial services customers in December, Fluid Cache for DAS 1.0 is another example of how Dell is building innovative capabilities on the foundation of our award-winning PowerEdge 12th generation servers, and is one of many acceleration offerings helping you to get more out of your applications. 

Future Fluid Cache technology releases will enhance the capabilities of Dell SAN storage, such as Dell Compellent, by extending automated tiering beyond storage arrays to include servers for greater performance and optimization of storage resources. We also will support additional operating systems and hypervisors, delivering capabilities to meet the demands of virtually any organization.

For more on this innovative solution, see the video below:

About the Author: Brian Payne

Brian Payne leads a team responsible for defining the portfolio strategy as well as the detailed definitions for each offer in the portfolio. In his role, Brian collaborates across the Dell Technologies portfolio inclusive of the full line of Dell EMC infrastructure products as well as the software products such as the VMware Virtual Cloud Foundation portfolio.  Brian and members of his organization regularly engage with customers around the world to better understand their challenges and help them better understand how Dell can help them achieve their goals.  The insights gathered from our customers through these engagements coupled with primary research fuel the innovation engine for new offer development. Brian has over twenty years of product development experience at Dell.  He holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.