Intelligent Cache Acceleration Software
Cache acceleration software (CAS) enables the implementation of media aware storage architectures through intelligent storage caching that effectively combines a layer of fast media and a lower-cost storage pool to deliver affordable, high performance storage.
Today's data centers are held back by storage I/O that cannot keep up with ever-increasing demand, preventing systems from reaching their full performance potential. Traditional solutions, such as increasing storage, servers, or memory, add huge expense and complexity.
Cache acceleration software was designed to use a relatively small capacity of very fast media, such as Intel® Optane™ SSDs, to modernize data center environments and accelerate storage performance. Storage I/O can be balanced with other system components, so resources are utilized more effectively. CAS has a variety of customizable options that go beyond caching the most recently accessed I/O:
- Intelligent caching with workload stratification into file and I/O classification
- Multiple cache modes to accelerate reads vs writes
- Available enterprise validation and support
- No application changes required
- Flexible cache line sizes
Several implementations of CAS exist:
- Open CAS: An open source version available on GitHub so developers can incorporate CAS into their desired storage solution
- Intel® VROC Integrated Caching: An enterprise-supported and validated version of Open CAS delivered with Intel® VROC
- Intel® CAS for Windows: An Intel productized version available for Windows users
Optimized for Intel® Optane™ SSDs
Intel® Optane™ SSDs can accelerate applications, reduce transaction costs, and improve overall data center TCO when absorbed into storage architectures via cache acceleration software.
Ideal for Improving Storage Performance
- High endurance
- Balanced Read/WriteHigh performance
- High bandwidth
- Low latency
- No write amplification
- Similar capacities to traditional SSDs
Case Studies
- SolidWorks CAD: Boost and enhance SolidWorks performance for engineering design workloads
- Using NVM Express-based Intel® SSD boot drive as a caching device
- Intel® CAS accelerates QEMU
- Boost storage performance using Intel® Optane™ SSDs and Intel® QLC SSDs
- Intel® technologies unlock Apache Hadoop bottlenecks
Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU Integrated Caching (Intel® VROC IC)
Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC), Intel’s enterprise integrated RAID solution for Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, is adding support for intelligent integrated caching.
Built on Open CAS
RAID + caching = redundancy + performance
Enterprise supported and validated
Flexible usage models
Eliminates single points of failure
Delivered through participating server vendors as a feature of the platform
Pre-validated solution vetted and documented by Intel for easy installation
Open Cache Acceleration Software (Open CAS)
Open CAS Linux is an open source project that can accelerate your I/O-bound business applications that relay on slower SAN or direct attached back-end storage.
Why use Open CAS?
- Categorize I/O by block size, file, directory/path, or metadata for flexible cache tuning
- Update all servers at once without stopping I/O
- Increasing cache line size decreases memory footprint
- Flexible framework with kernel modules and wrappers to port CAS into desired storage stack
Support
Basic Open CAS support included when using an Intel® Optane™ SSD
Intel® CAS for Windows
For customers using Microsoft Windows, Intel provides a caching engine called Intel CAS that is still available for use and accessible below for download.
Download
- Intel® CAS for Windows (client or server OS support)
- Support provided for use with SSDs based on Intel® Optane™ technology only. Contact Intel Customer Support to open a support ticket.
- Use with other block devices (including Intel NAND SSDs) is unsupported, but functional.