Storage Vendors to Watch: Gear6

Last October, Gear6 came to my attention. But it didn't really hit home until a well-informed end-user talked to me about them at SNW. He was very excited about Gear6 product to address NFS performance issue with transaction databases. Based on what I understand, the product is a caching appliance, conceptually very easy to understand.

Excerpts from Gear6 website:

… keeping frequently accessed data in a very large central memory pool … This enables high performance data access by avoiding time-consuming disk operations and accelerates applications due to dramatically decreased response times and increased data throughput.

This innovative approach complements existing NAS/NFS deployments and installs transparently in the data center without requiring changes to current applications or infrastructure.

Actually, it was quite amusing at the conference. Most probably, I steered few end-users to Gear6 by suggesting to check out G6 caching appliance. These end users told me that they are using Oracle databases with NFS and performance being one of their pain points. I found three simple questions that can quickly tell whether someone may want to investigate G6 product.

1. Are you using transaction databases?


2. Do you use NFS mounts?


3. Do you have performance issues?

G6 product seems to be one of those products that require 10 minutes for presentation, 20 minutes for answering follow-up questions, 30 minutes for demo and then the question When do you want a unit for evaluation? Following is a clean version of a picture with G6, we drew at SNW. Is it feasible?
I will categorize Gear6 caching appliance as product that does only one thing but does it very well. With singular focus on NFS performance, Gear6 also made a good choice to attend Collaborate 07 an Oracle Community Event.

BTW, you may want to hop over to Thoughtput blog maintained by Gary Orenstein at Gear6 for more caching related information. Also check out these presentations from Gear6.





Share your thoughts on Gear6 and its caching appliance approach.