Flash storage pioneer Fusion-io today unveiled new updates to its ION Data Accelerator software, which the company claims can help IT organizations attain new levels of high availability (HA), increase application performance and simplify management.

Version 2.2 of Fusion ION Data Accelerator, the company’s shared, server-side application acceleration platform, supports “HA deployments in high performance InfiniBand and iSCSI environments for critical applications like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases,” stated Fusion-io in company remarks. In short, the company is gunning for more IT-intensive workloads.

“This new release enhances the enterprise appeal of the ION Data Accelerator solution with features that deliver expanded options for high availability, scalability and management across the datacenter,” stated Afshin Daghi, Fusion-io vice president of Systems Engineering, in company remarks. The software “delivers outstanding performance for enterprise database workloads and has also recently set a number of world records in VMware VMmark scores with our OEM partners,” he added.

Earlier this month, the Salt Lake City-based company revealed that its ION Data Accelerator software (v.1.3.0) and ioControl 2.0 Hybrid Storage had been deemed VMware Ready. “With Fusion-io shared flash solutions, like ioControl Hybrid Storage or ION Data Accelerator, integrated with VMware vSphere, enterprises can virtualize even the most challenging, data intensive workloads,” said Daghi.

Now the company is turning its attention to big business databases, like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.

Fusion-io boasts that customers of its software-defined storage solution can now better leverage higher bandwidth, 56 gigabit FDR (fourteen data rate) InfiniBand and 40 gigabit iSCSI interfaces for increased performance. The improvements enable IT departments to scale to 448 gigabit in a single ION Data Accelerator by slotting in more interfaces, claims Fusion-io.

As a bonus, it also simplifies network management, sidesteps I/O bottlenecks in SANs and helps businesses make the most out of their existing storage investments. The updated software “extends the useful life of traditional storage by offloading performance related storage tasks,” claims the company.

Fusion ioSphere management software, which is included with ION Data Accelerator, has been updated with tools to enable administrators to better manage “HA deployments and shared storage for multiple application environments,” asserts the company. It offers the ability to dynamically expand host connectivity and concurrently create independent storage pools for each application that’s tapping the flash performance tier created by ION Data Accelerator.