New Intel CAS-W: Accelerating Software Application Performance

Today Dell announced an exciting and innovative technology, Intel Cache Acceleration Software-Workstation (Intel CAS-W), the first enterprise-grade caching acceleration software application for workstations.  Intel CAS-W, designed for workstation professionals who work with large data files, provides solid state device (SSD) like performance at a fraction of the cost, and is offered exclusively on the latest Dell Precision tower and rack workstations.

The challenge today with current caching solutions is that all data is treated the same. Intel CAS-W solves this with a unique data caching policy that allows the user to effectively select which data type needs to be accelerated, providing better control and performance optimization. This “hot data” is placed on an SSD cache, fully utilizing its capacity, thus reducing the storage system latency and significantly improving performance. The remaining less active data, referred to as cold data, can be stored on a lower performance medium such as hard drives with spinning disks. Intel CAS-W also provides reliable and consistent data acceleration regardless of the current workload of the system, and enables system memory caching, referred to as buffered cache, which pushes performance to the edge.  All of these features optimize workstation resources, while the application is running in the background without any migration of data or imaging of the system.

Dell Engineers worked very closely with Intel designers to fully optimize the solution to achieve the highest performance gains with professional software applications.  Testing on Siemens NX, AutoCad, Dassault Solidworks, Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Softimage and other software applications have shown significant performance boosts with Intel CAS-W. According to Maurice Patel, head of Media & Entertainment Industry Marketing, Autodesk, “We have seen a many-fold increase in some of our internal tests. As the demand for larger data sets increase with 4K, stereoscopic projection and next generation consoles, the performance increase will be a great benefit for our 3D animation customers.”

This technology will be available on the new Dell Precision R7610 rack and T3610, T5610 and T7610 tower workstations starting in November.

About the Author: Ronald Lebert