… And LSI

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. and LSI Corporation announced the results of a collaborative solution for enabling greater virtual desktop density per server using VMware Horizon View.

Mellanox/LSI Storage Accelerator

The combined low-latency solution consists of a Mellanox 40GbE NICs and the LSI Nytro MegaRAID application acceleration card that integrates onboard flash capacity with intelligent caching software and HDD RAID management.

The integrated application acceleration solution is designed to provide customers with a lower cost alternative to traditional storage solutions. With a VDI workload, the joint solution supports up to 1,500 desktops across 10 vSphere servers with a hardware MSRP of less than $25,000.

"Providing acceptable response times to virtual desktop users while maximizing the number of desktop sessions per server can be challenging," said Manish Muthal, VP of product management and strategy, accelerated solutions division, LSI. "The low-latency LSI Nytro MegaRAID card, combined with Mellanox’s 40GbE NICs, delivers an intelligent and cost-effective VDI solution compared to all-flash solutions that can cost upwards of $100K."

"Mellanox 40GbE interconnects teamed with LSI PCIe flash cards optimizes VDI environments and provides unmatched cost-performance benefits," said Kevin Deierling, VP marketing, Mellanox. "The hardware offload capabilities embedded in our 40GbE NICs overcome the limitations of ordinary TCP/IP interconnects, thereby allowing servers to efficiently connect to the storage subsystem and take full advantage of the performance of flash storage in a VDI environment, and eliminates redundant and costly SAN infrastructure."

"A high density VDI environment can benefit from low latency storage," said Mason Uyeda, senior director, technical marketing, end-user computing, VMware, Inc. "This solution demonstrates the potential performance of an economical enterprise implementation using VMware Horizon View."

To evaluate this solution supporting a VMware Horizon View environment, a pair of white box servers was used with the 40GbE end-to-end solution and Nytro card. Since enterprise environments demand no single point of failure, the performance overhead of supporting a highly available configuration was measured.
 

Detailed paper on tested configuration