Chelsio Demos 5 Million IO/s for Cluster to Cloud Scale Deployment of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Chelsio Communications, Inc. announced that a demonstration of Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct using the company’s T5 40GbE iWARP RDMA adapters conducted in conjunction with Microsoft Corp. showed T5 cards enabling 5 million IO/s performance for a storage solution.

The demonstration utilizes a 16-node Storage Spaces Direct hyper-converged configuration, NVMe SSD technology, and DRAM connected across an iWARP RDMA-enabled fabric. iWARP is the preferred high performance RDMA over Ethernet solution from cluster to cloud scale, and allows leveraging existing Ethernet infrastructure without the limitations, complexity and costs of other RDMA protocols. Company’s iWARP RDMA adapters deliver the high throughput and low latency needed to leverage high performance Storage Spaces Direct.

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Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct enables continuously available storage clusters to use local storage, unlocking new high-performance NVMe SSDs and low-cost SATA SSDs and eliminates the old requirement for shared storage enclosures. The high-performance SMB Direct protocol is used for inter-node communication over the Storage Spaces Direct software storage bus.

“The iWARP standard enables building very efficient, high performance, Microsoft Cloud deployments very quickly,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO, Chelsio. “iWARP works with any legacy Ethernet switch, thereby enabling incremental Storage Spaces Direct installations without requiring a concurrent forklift upgrade of the switch infrastructure, or the entire datacenter. This ability to work with any non-DCBX switch, allows use of the most cost effective new or existing switch infrastructure with the least amount of support, while enabling an immediate plug and play deployment. In addition, Microsoft’s support of iWARP protoco since Windows Server 2012-R2 release, has allowed for years of testing for a very robust, tested, deployment with iWARP.“

“This technology demonstration highlights how Storage Spaces Direct, combined with advanced flash-based storage connected by Chelsio’s 40GbE iWARP networking solution, helps users build faster, easy-to-scale and reliable storage for their private cloud deployments,” said Erin Chapple, partner director, program management, enterprise cloud group, Microsoft.

In addition to Storage Spaces Direct, iWARP Protocol also powers other aspects of Windows installations such as Storage Replica for DR, SMB Direct for high performance file access, client RDMA for bringing RDMA benefits to Windows 10 deployments, and Network Direct for Windows HPC deployments.

Additional information regarding the demonstration is available in a Microsoft published blog post and a company’s technical brief.

About iWARP
Firm’s Terminator 5 ASIC offers a high performance, third generation implementation of RDMA over 40GbE – iWARP. T5 delivers end-to-end RDMA latency that is comparable to IB, using standard Ethernet infrastructure. iWARP is in production in GPU applications, in storage applications as a fabric for clustered storage, for Lustre and other storage applications, for HPC applications, and for remote replication and DR. It is a high performance, robust, reliable, and mature protocol that enables direct data placement, CPU savings, and RDMA functionality over TCP/IP and legacy Ethernet switches and Internet without performance penalties.