Maxta Hyper-Converged Solution Runs on Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3

Maxta, Inc. announced a new MaxDeploy Reference Architecture that is an hyper-converged solution to run on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 family, along with updates to its MxSP software.

The new release of MxSP is a software-defined storage solution to leverage the new server platform, with its improved speed, higher number of cores, NVMe storage interface, DDR4 memory, and 40GbE support.

The new MxSP running on the Xeon processor-based platform was demonstrated at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF)on September 9, 2014 at Moscone Center West, San Francisco, CA.

Maxta’s software-defined storage continues to deliver on the promise of hyper-convergence by providing greater choice, flexibility and savings while running on standard x86 servers. The E5-2600v3 running MxSP software helps accelerate this trend, delivering performance for hyper-converged environments. Performance testing shows that MxSP running on the new Xeon E5 processor increases VM density and storage performance for VMs in virtualized environments. In application-level testing, MxSP demonstrated support of 40% more Microsoft Exchange users than when ran on prior generations of Xeon processors.

New MxSP features provide improved VM-centric automation, simplified data protection, greater availability and resiliency with support for VMware Stretch Storage Metro Cluster for continuous availability in case of site, data center or rack failure, along with improved self-healing capabilities to detect and auto-correct inconsistencies in data. Performance enhancements include improved caching algorithms and improved flash utilization to deliver consistent and predictable latency.

MaxDeploy Hyper-Convergence Reference Architectures provide customers a repeatable and standard deployment model, ease of ordering, and predictability of interoperability and performance. MaxDeploy running on the E5-2600 v3 provides improvements over the previous generation of x86 servers in the number of I/O transactions per second, read and write latency, and the number of VMs deployed on a server. Additionally, MaxDeploy demonstrates the agility of MxSP by providing time to market and the ability to narrow the gap between the availability of a new x86 platform and the availability of a hyper-converged solution running on the new platform.

The Intel SSD Data Center Family for PCIe is configured as part of this MaxDeploy Reference Architecture, providing high-performance caching using the NVMe interface as part of MxSP’s improved flash utilization. The Intel Ethernet Controller XL710 10/40GbE can also be configured as part of the solution to support high I/O workloads and/or a large number of nodes. By using MaxDeploy with the E5-2600 v3 family, Intel SSD Data Center Family, and Intel Ethernet Controller XL710, enterprises have the flexibility to scale their environment on-demand without over provisioning resources.

“The enhancements to MxSP deliver more capabilities and performance than ever before to the virtual data center,” said Yoram Novick, Maxta founder, president and CEO. “With the ability to deliver best-in-class compute and storage technology on the latest standard, Intel-based servers, Maxta is able to maximize the promise of hyper-convergence with the greatest levels of choice, simplicity, and agility to meet market demands.”

“Pre-validated configurations are beneficial to customers in reducing risk and the investment required in time and resources to implement a soltion, while increasing the predictability of success,” said Bev Crair, GM for Intel Corp.‘s storage division. “Maxta’s tested Reference Architecture on the latest Intel Xeon processors, Intel SSDs and Intel Ethernet controllers, will help provide a time-to-market and performance advantage for enterprise customers implementing hyper-converged solutions.”

“The MaxDeploy Reference Architecture running on the new Intel Xeon processor turns MaxDeploy into the most powerful hyper-converged solution on the market,” said Greg White, CEO, Clearmatter, LLC. “The ability to immediately leverage the speed and agility of Intel’s latest processors with a validated software-defined storage solution from Maxta means that I gain a time-to-market competitive advantage along with increased performance and savings.”

“Enterprise, VM level data services are not typically available in legacy storage architectures and are only slowly becoming available in hypervisor-specific storage platforms,” said David Floyer, co-founder and CTO, Wikibon Project. “The pre-validated approach such as the MaxDeploy Reference Architecture, along with Maxta MxSP software, assists organizations to deploy predictable, repeatable and scalable IT infrastructure. The Maxta partnership with Intel is a key asset in offering converged Server SAN solutions in both enterprise and hyper-converged deployments.“

MaxDeploy Reference Architectures enable users to build hyper-converged solutions for the virtual data center based on their choice of hardware vendors. It offers predefined, validated configurations including common server platforms, storage media types and capacities and network switches. This eliminates compatibility issues, simplifies and shortens installation time and training, and helps organizations meet end user application and performance demands immediately.

Unlike other platforms on the market, MxSP is hypervisor-agnostic and includes features required in virtual environments such as end-to-end data integrity, efficient snapshots and cloning, and compression/deduplication for capacity optimization. Its simplified data protection options include an automated scheduler for snapshot management, predefined retention policies, and simple recovery. An enhanced dashboard displays performance and capacity information in real time.

Read also:
Maxta MaxDeploy Converged Reference Architecture
Built on Intel server boards and systems