Direct PCI Express (PCIe) attached flash storage offers unparalleled performance levels and vastly outperforms SAS/SATA-attached flash storage solutions. However, such PCIe attached flash storage cards have many restrictions.

By leveraging the expertise in PCIe based clustering and IO expansion technology, Dolphin, in partnership with Fusion-IO, provides an enhanced PCIe flash storage solution in the form of StorExpress - an appliance that augments the high-performing direct PCIe attached storage from Fusion-IO. StorExpress enables a larger capacity by using Fusion-IO's PCIe flash storage cards (iodrives) as building blocks and also provides disaggregation capabilities along the lines of SAS/SATA-attached flash storage.

In this white paper you'll read about:

• Configurations and usage models supported by StorExpress
• A brief summary of the migration of storage from hard disk drives to flash based solid state storage technology
• The advantages and disadvantages of direct PCIe attached solid state storage
• A usage case study for StorExpress

The paper then goes on to describe the rich feature set offered by StorExpress - this enables it to not only provide an enhanced version of direct PCIe attached storage but also offer additional capabilities that go over and beyond the realm of single host attached storage.