4Blox Unveils 4Mezzo

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- 4Blox, Inc., dedicated to improving iSCSI SAN performance, today announced 4Mezzo™, a new software product line that lowers the host CPU communications overhead associated with iSCSI-based storage area networks. 4Mezzo offers iSCSI Storage Area Network (SAN) storage system vendors a more environmentally friendly and more flexible approach to reducing the CPU processing demanded by the iSCSI protocol. 4Blox components expand CPU capacity associated with iSCSI processing by 3-10x.

“Energy consumption in the data center has become a big financial and environmental concern. Storage processing requires lots of power hungry CPUs that constantly need to be cooled,” said Dan Munro, CEO of 4Blox. “The traditional approach to improving iSCSI performance is to throw additional hardware at it which increases the need for power and cooling. Our software approach offers comparable performance by reducing the host CPU burden and using less processing cycles equates to less power and cooling.”

The most important hardware resource for efficiently handling increased load in iSCSI processing is CPU capacity. 4Mezzo software components reduce the CPU processing burden in iSCSI SAN’s at levels similar to those gained by offloading iSCSI processing to additional hardware. Unlike expensive offload hardware, the eco-friendly 4Mezzo components allow the network connection to handle any type of Ethernet traffic, at any line speed.

4Mezzo OS-level components sit directly between the iSCSI protocol and the TCP protocol. This critical location is where overall iSCSI performance is often determined. These components use patent pending techniques to dramatically reduce the CPU overhead associated with the block read and write software in existing SAN equipment targets and OS platform initiators.

4Blox Inc.