Since early last year, Tesla has had an “insane mode” on its Model S P85D that turbocharges the car’s acceleration at the press of a button. Now, a startup has borrowed the concept for its storage systems.

Sunnyvale-based Datrium Inc. today is introducing a similarly faster Insane Mode in the latest release of the DVX software for its “server-powered” storage systems.

The company’s disk-based systems, contained in a shelf that slides into a data center server rack for VMware virtual machines, essentially turn standard servers into hybrid flash arrays. Datrium says they can scale up flash storage faster and less expensively than either controller-based arrays made by the likes of EMC, Pure Storage and HPE or hyperconverged systems made by Nutanix and others.

Datrium’s default “fast mode” reserves 20 percent of a server’s central processing units. The new Insane Mode reserves up to 40 percent, allowing application data transfer to double in real time without having to turn off the disk array or replace controllers. “We’re accelerating your workload at the touch of a button,” said Craig Nunes, Datrium’s vice president of marketing.

Nunes said the apparent danger of siphoning off too much of a server’s computing power is lessened by the reality that server cores are often only working at 10 percent to 30 percent capacity anyway.

No word on whether Datrium will follow Tesla’s lead further and introduce an even faster “ludicrous mode.”

Datrium Chief Executive Officer Brian Biles spoke with theCUBE, owned by the same parent company as SiliconANGLE, at VMworld last September:

Photo from Datrium