Gear6: 500 GB of "memory attached storage"

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The Register’s Ashlee Vance has a profile of hardware startup Gear6.

The Silicon Valley-based firm ships a pair of caching appliances. These RAM-based boxes plug right into existing Ethernet networks and work as complements to disk-based shared storage systems. As a result, applications that depend on accessing large data sets tend to enjoy dramatic performance improvements by getting much of their information straight from the speedy appliances rather than always going out to disk.

The device comes in 250 GB and 500 GB flavors and, according to the company, performs better than NAS devices

At 250,000 IOPS, Gear6 boasts that it can beat out a high-end NAS (network attached storage) system from, say, NetApp by 5X. The company also says that its half a millisecond latency easily beats out the typical 2 to 8 milliseconds of latency experienced by customers with demanding, clustered software. All told, Gear6 promises a 10X to 30X performance improvement for applications with large data sets.