Mellanox Introduces RDMA-Based Virtual SAN Software Appliance

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced the availability of its VSA Virtual SAN (vSAN) software appliance that leverages server hardware with local storage and SSDs to form large-scale, virtual storage networks (vSAN).

The VSA vSAN software appliance has built-in caching and clustering, and utilizes RDMA, IB and Ethernet hardware acceleration to deliver six-fold faster performance than using FC SAN storage systems. It reduces the costs of FC SAN adapters, switches, and physical storage systems, while creating application performance over virtualized infrastructures.

The VSA vSAN software appliance supports iSCSI and hardware accelerated iSCSI with RDMA (iSER), provides centralized cluster management for multiple virtual appliances, and can be managed through VMware vCenter via a plug-in. It can also act as a virtual FC SAN gateway, enabling coexistence with and acceleration of existing and legacy FC SANs.

With VSA vSAN software appliance, a single:

• VM client can achieve 190,000 IOPS and 5GB/s bandwidth
• VSA target appliance instance can deliver 65GB/s with a single RDMA adapter, and 125GB/s with two adapters, and can serve more than 1,000,000 IOPS
• VSA vSAN cluster, consisting of multiple nodes, scales linearly and can deliver hundreds of gigabytes/second and millions of IOPS

"Today’s virtual environents require shared storage for manageability and mobility, adding significant cost of shared/SAN storage," said Yaron Haviv, VP of data center solutions at Mellanox. "Mellanox VSA vSAN software appliance significantly reduces data center and cloud infrastructure costs while actually boosting application performance. In addition, its internal RDMA-based clustering technology scales out to many virtual appliances without performance or efficiency loss."