Traditional disks often pose as an I/O bottleneck for high transaction applications. You can compensate this by either increasing the in-RAM cache size or investing in expensive storage. SmartIO is a data caching solution that helps in improving I/O performance of applications by:
Providing a read-only/write-through I/O cache on a locally attached Solid State drives (SSDs). To support VMware vMotion, the SmartDisks must replace SSDs. SmartDisks are the disks assigned by Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware. These disks are provisioned from an aggregated pool of SSDs.)
Reducing the I/O requests on the back-end storage
De-centralizing the storage
Freeing the available network and controller capacity to handle traffic for more servers and application consolidation on a system
Interposing a central management layer between cached-device and the applications that need to access them
SmartIO supports volume-level read-only caching as SSDs are primarily beneficial in high-read environments.