DataCore revs up apps with memory caching

It was a long time ago, and my memory may not serve me perfectly well, but I’m pretty sure that the concept of caching is about as old as computing itself. Nevertheless, dedicating fast-access memory space to temporarily park frequently referenced data is still the best and most effective way to cut down on I/O time.

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However interesting these solutions may be, their costs are well beyond the reach of a small company budget. Designed to work with large storage systems, they are priced accordingly.

Enter UpTempo, a software accelerator from DataCore that was just announced this week. As usual for DataCore, the name of the application was plucked from the musical dictionary. Other products in the DataCore portfolio go by the titles SANmelody, SANsymphony, and SANmaestro, to name just a few.

UpTempo, when installed on a Windows machine, automatically carves out a large, dedicated chunk of memory for caching. In my trial on a Windows XP desktop with 1.5GB of RAM, UpTempo claimed about one-third of the total memory for caching, though that value can be manually adjusted.

After restarting my machine (yes, this is a requirement), I launched SiSoftware Sandra to measure the read speed on the C: drive, which is a plain 80GB Western Digital unit. With UpTempo caching, its performance numbers almost ran off the chart, leaving the benchmark’s set of reference drives in the dust. (Follow the red line on the chart.)

Comparing the results I obtained on the same machine without UpTempo, the caching sped up my drive by a factor of almost 15, which seems too good to be true and probably is. In fact, DataCore suggests that the speed boost will most commonly fall in the 3X to 4X range, although better results are also possible.

Regardless, what really matters is how much UpTempo can speed up your Windows servers, a question that should be easy to answer because you can download a 30-day trial version without much fuss from DataCore.

A server license of UpTempo costs a bit less than $500, which is a small price to pay to reduce some of the I/O bottlenecks your servers may have. However, don’t even think of installing UpTempo on servers that are tight on memory. Unless there is memory to spare, reserving part of it for caching could actually make your server less responsive rather than improve performance.

After all, good performance depends on a balanced orchestration of machine resources so that each component keeps, yes, a proper tempo.