Announcement: RapidDisk 2.0 Beta release with the NEW RapidCache kernel module

It is here! The 2.0 beta release of RapidDisk which introduces the new RapidCache module. Now I only thoroughly tested this on 32-bit hardware running Ubuntu 10.04 and 11.10. Any help to test 64-bit architectures and newer distro releases would be greatly appreciated. As you may already know, all bugs and such should be reported to the project's official bug tracker: http://bugs.rapiddisk.org

Now time to explain RapidCache. You may already know that RapidDisk can achieve great performance numbers ranging from 700 MB/s to over 1 GB/s in both sequential & random write & read operations. But the purpose of RapidCache is to map a RapidDisk volume to a separate physical volume as a Write-Through and Read-Through caching node. This means that sequential & random write operations do not change and shouldn't expect to change. But sequential & random read operations sky rocket when retrieving cached data.

For instance, I mapped a 512 MB rxdsk node to an external USB spinning drive and ran a utility written by Jens Axboe. It is one currently used by Fusion I/O and called fio. With a profile of 4 KB writes to a 32 MB file and a queue depth of 4 while the file descriptor is opened for Direct I/O operation.....

Without RapidCache: Sequential Read: 4 MB/s & Random Read: 0.3 MB/s With RapidCache: Sequential Read: 87 MB/s & Random Read: 86 MB/s

Wow! Now note this is not an ideal solution in all environments. It should be mainly utilized in an environment where there are a lot of read requests, especially over the same data regions.

Read more about RapidCache here: http://rapiddisk.org/index.php?title=RapidCache View details on download and installation here: http://rapiddisk.org/index.php?title=Download_and_Installati... View more performance numbers here: http://rapiddisk.org/index.php?title=Performance

Again, this release is in beta. And please read through the RapidCache wiki page carefully before using. Another note, I will get a tarball up on the Sourceforge project site shortly but in the meanwhile, you can easily just check out the source from the git repo (see link above).

Also, one last note: To stay updated on the latest news and releases, feel free to follow the RapidDisk Google+ Page: https://plus.google.com/u/0/116869691296916480289/posts