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Mellanox along with leading-industry x86 server and storage partners is providing a high speed, low-latency and cost efficient storage fabric solution to customers to efficiently manage their growing storage needs.

Today’s data center deployments face unique challenges from infrastructure providers who sell their proprietary expensive closed systems, while customers are now looking towards more economical, robust and scalable enterprise storage & networking solutions. Mellanox VSA, ConnectX - 2 HCAs and Mellanox InfiniBand switches in combination with x86 based commodity servers and leading SSDs can provide customers with this exact cost effective scale out storage fabric design.

The VSA stack achieves higher IOPs, greater throughput, lower access times and higher CPU efficiency.

Mellanox VSA is a storage fabric acceleration solution, that provides ultra-fast remote block storage access and accelerates access to SAN, DAS, or Flash based storage for enterprise deployment and traditional and virtualized environments.

To address I/O performance challenges for host connectivity, VSA provides a superior optimized storage transport engine, and a scale-out design that can maximize throughput and process many transactions in parallel — and with very little I/O overhead and access time.

A VSA based storage cluster can process millions of transactions per second, deliver hundreds of Gb/s of data, and speed access time by a factor of 100X over traditional storage, leading to far greater application performance at lower costs and power. VSA improves performance of applications that require rapid access to data such as persistent messaging systems in financial services, business analytics, databases, data warehouses, high-performance computing, web 2.0 and cloud deployments. For cloud providers or VMware ESX users, VSA significantly boosts virtual machine performance and eliminates I/O delays and boot storms, while reducing storage costs. In addition, VSA provides central management access that enables CLI & GUI based management for multiple VSA storage servers.

Discovery

Multipath FC Virtualization

Ultra-fast, parallel data mover architecture

SAN (FC/iSCSI)

Data mover engines

Raid, DR, LVM

Flash Cache

Configuration Monitoring

DAS (SAS/SATA)

Flash Cards

VSA/3rd Party Data Providers

VSA Cluster Manager

Config Logs

Acceleration and I/O Virtualization services

Scale-out and fault-tolerant management

ledom

Storage Resources

BI bG04or 10GbE

Clients

VSA Overview

Mellanox VSA for Scalable Storage Data Center SolutionsBuilding Cost-Effective Database Storage Solutions with VSA, HP Industry Standard x86 Servers and Fusion-io SSDs

VSA Overview ..............................................................................................................................1

Economical and Efficient Solutions..............................................................................................2

Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................3

page 2WHITE PAPER: Mellanox VSA For Scalable Storage Data Center Solutions

©2011 Mellanox Technologies. All rights reserved.

VSA’s zero-copy architecture based on Mellanox HCA’s RDMA, allows it to saturate the server I/O buses and deliver more than 5GB/s of bandwidth per storage server/gateway. It incorporates multiple ultra-fast datamover engine processes. It communicates directly with the Mellanox HCA and leverages hardware offload capabilities to process the storage transactions. VSA enables unprecedented IOPs performance and a very low access time less than 70 microseconds. VSA data mover engines communicate with a services layer that delivers caching, RAID, multi-path, and I/O virtualization. Users can deploy a cluster of VSA servers with a combination of DAS, SAN, and Flash storage, and achieve the aggregate performance and capacity. Multiple VSA appliances are managed as a single cluster with unified CLI/GUI management interface. The cluster manager provides central resources and hierarchy discovery, automated configuration for network and storage elements, central monitoring and logging, and secure role-based remote access.

Fabric Interface

Flash Caching

Virtualization

Local Storage

FC SAN

Replication

Load Balancing

Fabric Interface

Flash Caching

Virtualization

Local Storage

InfiniBand or Ethernet Fabric • Low-latency • High IOPs

• iSCSI & iSER

• vDisks • FC vHBAs

• Software RAID

VSA Server or gateway

Current proprietary storage database solutions are expensive and create vendor lock-in, interoperability and scalability challenges for the future. Mellanox along with Hewlett Packard and Fusion-io have developed similar database and cloud solution at a lower cost with standard industry hardware and software. This solution can be scaled with increased capacity, therefore relieving the customer of upfront cost burden to buy a large propriety appliance.

The setup described in this case study included a leading database engine installed on HP’s DL980 server with 8 Mellanox 40Gb/s VPI enabled adapter cards. The cards were enabled to run InfiniBand fabric with 2 Mellanox Grid Director 4036 switches. Five storage servers based on HP’s DL370 with 2 x 40Gb/s InfiniBand HCAs and 4 x 1.28TB Flash (Fusion-io Duo) each.

HP DL 980 8 x 40Gb IB HCAs

5 x HP DL 370 (4U) :htiw hcaE

2 x 40Gb IB HCAs hsalF BT82.1 x 4

(FusionIO Duo)

VSA

VSA

VSA

VSA

VSA

Database (Oracle) Storage Servers

2 x Mellanox 4036

Total of only 20RU

The proposed solution has 1 database server with 2 low cost switches and 5 high capacity storage servers. Throughput of 23Gb/s was achieved for storage which is also equivalent to 50 fiber channel

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© Copyright 2011. Mellanox Technologies. All rights reserved.Mellanox, BridgeX, ConnectX, CORE-Direct, InfiniBlast, InfiniBridge, InfiniHost, InfiniRISC, InfiniScale, InfiniPCI, PhyX, Virtual Protocol Interconnect and Voltaire are registered trademarks of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. FabricIT is a trademark of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

connections in traditional storage solutions. 100X faster access time was achieved with the solution over traditional connectivity.

The following table shows various benefits of a scaled out storage fabric solution with industry standard components over proprietary solutions.

Propriety Database SolutionVSA + Fusion-io and HP ISS based Database Solution

1 Million Read IOPS 4 Million Read IOPS

500k Write IOPS 3 Million Write IOPS

24 GB/s write Bandwidth 40 GB/s write Bandwidth

5TB Flash Memory Cache 20TB Flash Memory Cache

100TB SAS Storage 100TB SAS Storage

336TB SATA Storage 336TB SATA Storage

84,096 kWh/year 62,196 kWh/year

$1.15 per IOPS (hardware only) $0.20 per IOPS (estimate)

$120K per Storage Server for SW $40K per Storage Server for SW

During data center build out, solution architects and providers should consider a solution which can scale per their needs and also have low overall cost and power consumption. Mellanox VSA installed on HP’s industry standard servers with Linux operating systems and Fusion-io drives is a scalable, lower power and cost solution for Web 2.0 data center, cloud deployment and database markets for various heterogeneous environments.

Conclusion