PernixData, a rising star in the increasingly turbulent virtualization market, is going after small and medium businesses with a new version of its flagship offering, a flash-aware hypervisor that made its debut earlier this month.

“Many small and mid-sized companies today sacrifice storage performance for cost when they invest in entry-level storage arrays,” said Jeff Aaron, the vice president of marketing at PernixData. “While these products deliver cost-effective capacity, they provide limited IOPS and cannot scale with demand. PernixData FVP eliminates this trade-off. For the first time ever, SMBs can now afford the scale-out storage performance they need by using server side flash in conjunction with their existing arrays. No expensive storage upgrades are required.”

The SMB Edition of PernixData FVP lets users tap into server-side flash to address the capacity needs of VMs and applications without having to take legacy data store requirements into consideration. The software also takes advantage of organizations’ existing virtualization investments to deploy in less than 20 minutes without forcing any changes or reboots.

The main feature of the platform is a patent-pending “Flash Cluster” capability that gives hosts remote access to all flash resources in the cluster. The company says that the technology simplifies operations across the board without modifying existing workflows or taking a toll on overall performance. Flash Cluster is complemented by support for full read and write acceleration with fault tolerance, a feature that improves performance while replicating writes across clustered hosts.

The SMB Edition of FVP, priced at a flat $9,999, supports up to 100 VMs across a maximum of four hosts with two processors and one flash drive each. The Enterprise Edition will set you back $7,500 per host, but it doesn’t cap the number of VMs, processors or SSDs.