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Well, This Is Exciting

Today SanDisk announced that it has acquired FlashSoft, and the entire FlashSoft team will join SanDisk, where we will continue to develop our software solutions for enterprise flash as a part of the company's Enterprise Storage Solutions business. This is an exciting development for us, and we're especially glad to be working as a part of SanDisk ESS.

FlashSoft viewpoint: The importance of the Fusion IO + IO Turbine acquisition

The Fusion-io IPO earlier this year captured a lot of attention, and their recent financial results show that there's a very healthy demand for flash in the enterprise. Fusion-io's plan to acquire IO Turbine further validates the importance of server-tier caching, which we have experienced first-hand in numerous successful implementations of FlashSoft's software.

So, why is SSD-based caching in a server such a big deal? Because right now the typical server is running at just a fraction of its potential because it is bottlenecked by IO latency.

Apples & Oranges: Caching in the Server v. Caching in Storage

Since we launched our company a couple of weeks ago, we still enjoy seeing FlashSoft mentioned in an article, even if it's just a mention like "other companies with flash-based caching solutions include FlashSoft…" After all, we'd been working under the radar since 2009, and only introduced ourselves once we had a shipping product, some customer successes, and partnerships with industry-leading vendors. So even a brief mention in a blog or publication is a nice reminder that we're now in the public eye.

 

Launched!

For a company that spends far more cycles developing software than marketing itself, the past few weeks have felt a little surreal. But since we got our first product release out the door and into customers' hands, and Thomvest stepped up to lead the funding for our next stage of growth, it was time to go public about the progress we'd made so far. And we're really glad that we did.

 

Lighten Up, Francis

One of the challenges we've faced at FlashSoft is that because we do something new, we don't fit cleanly into a standard product category. We're really obsessed with Flash SSD, but we don't sell SSDs. (Many of our partners do.) We enable Flash SSDs to increase IO performance, which is something you'll find in some high-end storage appliances, but our software is for servers.

Putting Flash where it belongs

Flash can provide enormous benefits in IO performance, but Flash is not cheap. That's why it's critical that when you choose to address IO latency with Flash, you put the Flash where it can do the most good. And that's in the server. Right next to the memory and CPU. Not on the other side of a SAN, on top of a storage appliance. A few storage vendors have integrated Flash in their appliances, and more will do so. Because it does improve the performance of the appliance.

Nice to meet you

With the update to our Web site under way, we've begun a company blog. Over the next several years, our industry will undergo some major changes, and we hope to play a significant role in driving some of those changes. This blog gives us a place to comment with a personal perspective on the evolution of our industry as it happens.

Since this is our first post, we'd like to briefly lay out our perspective on enterprise Flash, the perspective that led us to start FlashSoft in the first place.

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