Today it’s Adaptec’s turn to take a whack at cloud computing.

Adaptec is an I/O heavyweight with 11 million controllers installed worldwide and it’s got a “strategic vision” for routing, optimizing and protecting data as it moves through the I/O path called the Adaptec Data Conditioning Platform, widgetry it’s been working on for the last two years.

It claims this “intelligent I/O management approach” will cut the cost of public and private cloud data centers, maximize system performance and achieve “meaningful” green IT objectives without changing existing storage architectures, application software or operating systems.

It’s throwing its core competencies, chiefly its ability to condition and optimize data in the I/O path, into the mix to expand its business.

To support the new strategy, it’s announced a new product family under the Data Conditioning Platform banner.

Its MaxIQ SSD cache performance solution is called an industry “first” for building and managing intelligent high-performance hybrid arrays (HPHAs) that combine both solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) to achieve I/O performance three to five times faster than HDD-only arrays and save up to 50% in capital and operating expenses.

It integrates customized 32GB Intel X25-E Extreme SATA SSDs with its own SSD caching software to accelerate read-intensive applications in “demanding” data centers reportedly without disrupting existing operations.

The company says that by integrating new capabilities in the I/O data path, it will provide cloud computing and other large enterprise data center environments with products that can reduce capital and operating expenditures, while improving system performance and points to its Zero-Maintenance Cache Protection, the first maintenance-free, Flash-based cached data protection solution, and its Intelligent Power Management, which is supposed to reduce storage power and cooling costs by up to 70%.

The data optimization functionality delivered through Adaptec’s Data Conditioning Platform is supposed to reduce the amount of server and storage hardware required and lower ongoing operating costs by reducing power consumption, maintenance costs and the physical space required.

The Data Conditioning Platform is also supposed to enable intuitive centralized management of servers and storage systems.

The widgetry should scale to meet increasing throughput requirements and improve server and storage utilization at the maximum I/O performance. It’s also supposed also to help data center managers achieve meaningful “green” objectives by minimizing the number of servers and storage devices required and reducing direct system power and cooling power costs.

Now about this MaxIQ SSD business.

Adaptec figures it’s a cost-effective, scalable hybrid storage solution that can deliver the highest I/Os per dollar at the lowest dollar per gigabyte, providing scalability without the sprawl.

It includes a patent-pending “Learned-Path” algorithm that identifies frequently (hot) read data blocks and optimizes subsequent “reads” by moving “hot” data directly into the SSD cache for lower latencies and higher system performance.

Got that?

By leveraging its presence in the data path to create a “read cache pool,” Adaptec says a high-performance hybrid array with a single MaxIQ SSD cache can deliver up to five times the input/output per second (IOPS) of comparable SAS-only deployments.

The result should be a “dramatic” acceleration in application performance, alleviating the bottleneck that can occur between server processors and hard drives, allowing data center managers to increase the number of users hosted per IT dollar and reducing the need for additional equipment acquisition and significantly cut data center energy costs.

Adaptec says it’s “ideal” for data centers running applications with high “read” demands such as web serving, file serving and databases. It can be deployed using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, so data centers can convert industry standard servers into “cost-effective, high-performance, scale-out application storage appliances that require no modification of existing storage architectures, application software or operating systems for easy integration.”

It also offers “simple and flexible” expandability allowing up to four SSDs to be added to, or removed from, the cache pool without impacting data integrity or operations.

Adaptec says pure SSDs are pricey; its MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Kit with software runs $1,295.