Welcome to 4Blox

Overview

iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface) has been categorized by leading industry analysts as a “transformational technology” that enables Small to Medium sized businesses to install, deploy and easily maintain enterprise-class storage systems based on low-cost commodity hardware and simple-to-use IP networks.

However, iSCSI-based Storage Area Networks (SANs) experience severe system performance degradation when used on standalone servers with large numbers of users or with bandwidth intensive applications – like backup and video, and on virtualized servers where CPU resources are constrained by multiple Guest OSes. The CPUs deployed in typical storage subsystems are quickly overloaded with iSCSI processing and 10GbE connections can exhaust host CPU processing with even a small number of users.

As the above graphic shows today there is a performance gap between network speed and CPU processing power and it is increasing. With 40 GbE and 100GbE standards developments underway the gap will widen even further. Also, the performance gap becomes ever more acute in situations where the CPU is shared by multiple guest OSes in virtualized environments.

Now you can improve iSCSI performance by reducing the CPU processing associated with iSCSI without costly and inflexible hardware based techniques. 4Blox™ provides storage system and OS vendors with 4Mezzo, a family of software components used to expand CPU processing capacity in iSCSI SAN solutions for Standalone OSes at high speeds and Virtualized OSes.

Within the iSCSI SAN architecture, there is a “stack” of protocols used for communicating between the “target” (disk array attached to a server) and the requesting application (“initiator”). This infrastructure software is typically bundled in all the major operating systems as both initiator and target components specifically for enabling an iSCSI SAN function. The OS-level component software that 4Blox™ provides sits directly between the iSCSI protocol and the TCP protocol.

Available for a wide range of standalone OSes or iSCSI SAN solutions from Original Equipment Manufacturers, Value Added Resellers, Value Added Distributors and Independent Software Vendors.

Ideally suited for virtualized OSes where there are many restrictions on using traditional hardware-based iSCSI optimization techniques.

The performance improvement provided by 4Mezzo™ – and as benchmarked in our lab – is CPU utilization – which in turn translates to an increase in the number of users accessing data over an iSCSI-based storage network. The performance gain we can achieve is between 3X and 10X over standard iSCSI implementations available today.