Zadara Storage Solution Using iSCSI Extensions for RDMA

Zadara Storage, Inc. announced a high performance storage as a service (STaaS) solution offering for private clouds – the Zadara iSER VPSA – using an Ethernet transport mechanism for performance at reduced costs.

The latest generation of its Virtual Private Storage Array services, iSER VPSA takes advantage of iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER) using 40GbE to cut latency and boost application performance. Zadara Storage offers a storage array supporting this next generation Ethernet-based transport. While all block-based applications running on iSER VPSA will see improvements, latency-sensitive databases will see a marked improvement in their transaction per second (TPS) count.

Developed in collaboration with Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., the iSER VPSA works by delivering iSCSI storage traffic over 40GbE, with minimal overhead. Traffic goes directly to applications’ memory buffers, hence minimizing latency at every step. The Mellanox NIC-based iSER VPSA solution offers application level performance improvements while being comparably priced to ordinary Ethernet solutions without RDMA capabilities.

Zadara Storage is a provider of fully-managed NAS and SAN in the cloud and on-premises with elasticity, high QoS, scalability, privacy and pay-as-you-go pricing. This latest offering, iSER VPSA, is available for customers of the recently announced OPaaS (On-Premise as a Service) offering who use Mellanox iSER compatible NICs on site at no additional charge. As with other Zadara Storage solutions, iSER VPSA incorporates the same hallmark multitenancy, high QoS, dedicated, private drives, hourly metering, consumption pricing, and suite of enterprise storage features. iSER VPSA is available in addition to the company’s existing STaaS solutions deployed at public clouds providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Dimension Data, and CloudSigma.

“The Zadara iSER VPSA storage platform is an ideal solution to boost application performance using iSER over RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet),” said Kevin Deierling, VP marketing, Mellanox. “The combined solution of Zadara’s iSER VPSA with Mellanox RDMA-based 40 GbE NICs delivers substantially improved latency and throughput compared to more costly interfaces like FC, and thus delivers cost savings and converged enterprise storage for private clouds of all sizes.“

“Hot on the heels of our OPaaS announcement, which brings the power of a cloud business model to private storage, we are innovating again with our iSER VPSA solution,” added Nelson Nahum, CEO, Zadara. “With it we can now deliver to our customers more performance and potentially save them money. It is noteworthy that, thanks to our patented software defined storage architecture, we were able to be the first to deliver this breakthrough capability to the market.“

Zadara Storage showcased its new iSER VPSA as well as OPaaS solution at the VMworld Innovator’s Pavilion.