CloudFounders is targeting enterprise customers with a software-defined storage platform that is claimed to accelerate virtual machine performance while also cutting costs by enabling greater storage flexibility, including the ability to extend to cloud-based storage such as Amazon S3.

Open vStorage, set for full release in the third quarter of this year, is designed to boost performance of virtualised infrastructure in the data centre, with support for VMware and Microsoft’s hypervisors plus the open-source KVM.

The platform creates a distributed storage platform across the data centre, taking in existing storage resources such as local disks, SAN and NAS hardware. It also calls for flash or solid-state drives (SSDs) in each server node to act as a local cache, delivering performance of 100,000IOPS per host, according to CloudFounders.

“What we’re trying to do is create a new software-defined storage layer that combines the best of both worlds,” said Kurt Glazemakers, chief technology officer of CloudFounders, referring to the two current trends for cloud-based big data storage and the growing use of SSDs to accelerate server workloads.

Key features of Open vStorage are that it provides each virtual machine (VM) with its own virtual disk. The core part of the platform, the Cloud Storage Router (CSR) can also link up with cloud-based storage services such as Amazon S3.

“The VM-centric approach means we can deploy and roll back snapshots on a single VM basis,” said Glazemakers. Traditional storage arrays provision capacity in such a way that multiple VMs are deployed in the same place, which complicates the roll-back process if just a single one of the VMs needs it, he claimed.

Support for cloud storage also turns Open vStorage into a hybrid storage platform that spans both local and cloud-based infrastructure, according to the firm, and takes advantage of the falling cost of cloud storage.

“By sizing the flash or SSD, we can leverage much slower back-ends, allowing you to use Amazon S3, for example. You need to do much more caching to avoid writes because of the object-based storage and the latency of the reads,” said Glazemakers.

Open vStorage is currently in beta, and the firm is opening it up to further testers with today’s announcement. Licensing details will be disclosed with the full release, according to CloudFounders.