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SAN JOSE, Calif. – October 8, 2007 – 4Blox, Inc.™, dedicated to improving iSCSI SAN performance, today announced 4Mezzo™, a new software product line that lowers the host CPU communications overhead associated with iSCSI-based storage area networks. 4Mezzo offers iSCSI Storage Area Network (SAN) storage system vendors a more environmentally friendly and more flexible approach to reducing the CPU processing demanded by the iSCSI protocol. 4Blox components expand CPU capacity associated with iSCSI processing by 3-10x.
“Energy consumption in the data center has become a big financial and environmental concern. Storage processing requires lots of power hungry CPUs that constantly need to be cooled,” said Dan Munro, CEO of 4Blox. “The traditional approach to improving iSCSI performance is to throw additional hardware at it which increases the need for power and cooling. Our software approach offers comparable performance by reducing the host CPU burden and using less processing cycles equates to less power and cooling.”
The most important hardware resource for efficiently handling increased load in iSCSI processing is CPU capacity. 4Mezzo software components reduce the CPU processing burden in iSCSI SAN’s at levels similar to those gained by offloading iSCSI processing to additional hardware. Unlike expensive offload hardware, the eco-friendly 4Mezzo components allow the network connection to handle any type of Ethernet traffic, at any line speed.
4Mezzo OS-level components sit directly between the iSCSI protocol and the TCP protocol. This critical location is where overall iSCSI performance is often determined. These components use patent pending techniques to dramatically reduce the CPU overhead associated with the block read and write software in existing SAN equipment targets and OS platform initiators.
CPU capacity - 4Blox software components expand CPU capacity associated with iSCSI processing by 3-10x. Read / write block code from 4Blox dramatically reduces the host CPU processing overhead enabling higher connection loads and the ability to take advantage of higher network line speeds like 10GbE.
Lower cost - A software-only approach rivals the performance available from iSCSI Host Bus Adapters (HBA) at a fraction of the cost and is line-speed independent. 4Blox enables higher iSCSI performance at lower cost than HBA solutions while reducing the need for additional hardware or CPU’s.
Flexible - HBA’s restrict network traffic to iSCSI while the 4Blox software approach combines with standard NIC’s and TOE cards to allow the network connection to handle any type of Ethernet traffic. Further, 4Blox Software components can be dynamically enabled on any combination of available network ports in a given system while HBA’s typically support a fixed number of ports per card.
Green - By reducing CPU processing instead of just moving the storage protocol processing to additional hardware, 4Mezzo contributes to reducing the heat and power consumption associated with storage systems in use at data centers.
The new 4Mezzo components will be available in reference code form on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The 4Mezzo iSCSI Target is in beta now and will be generally available in October 2007. The 4Mezzo iSCSI Initiator will be available in the first half of 2008.
4Blox, Inc., is the first
software company dedicated to improving iSCSI
SAN performance. The company’s family of
software-based accelerators reduce the host CPU
processing overhead associated with iSCSI. As a
result, businesses enable higher connection
loads and the ability to take advantage of
higher network line speeds like 10GbE. For more
information on 4Blox please visit www.4Blox.com
Contact:
Donna Michaels
Loughlin/Michaels Group
408-393-5575
email: donna@lmgpr.com
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