Mellanox With VMware

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. is collaborating with VMware, Inc. to help customers make the performance of their storage systems more efficient.

The solution was previewed at VMworld 2017, with Mellanox iSER (iSCSI Extensions for Remote Direct Memory Access [RDMA]) networking solutions leveraging vSphere. iSER uses an Ethernet Storage Fabric as a unified connectivity solution for compute and storage, thereby eliminating the need for FC while providing improved performance at a lower cost. Preliminary benchmark results show that iSER accelerates storage throughput by more than 3x and IO/s by more than 2x when compared to ordinary iSCSI. In addition, it also enables 2x better efficiency versus FC storage connectivity.

iSER is an industry standard protocol that uses RDMA technology to eliminate the network processing overhead, while preserving compatibility with the widely used iSCSI protocol. Thus it enjoys the stability, resiliency, security, HA and recovery benefits of iSCSI, which makes it an enterprise-ready storage networking solution.

iSER uses RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) NICs, over ordinary Ethernet networks without requiring lossless configuration. This allows cloud, storage, and enterprise customers to deploy iSER more quickly while accelerating application performance, improving total infrastructure efficiency and reducing cost.

“Modern applications must be able to analyze large amounts of data in a very short amount of time,” said Kevin Deierling, VP, marketing, Mellanox. “This requires both high performance and efficient storage systems with Ethernet connectivity, which makes iSER technology the ideal Ethernet Storage Fabric for today’s data centers.“

The vSphere platform enables businesses to leverage virtualization to maximize performance, availability and efficiency for infrastructure and applications. vSphere serves as a foundation for any cloud environment, allowing businesses to better utilize the underlying physical hardware resources across multiple systems and provides pools of virtual resources to the data center.

“VMware continues to add new capabilities to vSphere enabling it to be the next-gen infrastructure ready for next-gen apps,” said Mike Adams, senior director, cloud platform product marketing, VMware. “Enabling applications to achieve faster access to storage over iSER facilitates the use of Ethernet for networking, compute and storage. This can simplify customers’ experience with automation and management at scale and can provide an improved customer experience.“

“We are pleased to see the growing support for iSER technology in the marketplace,” said Nelson Nahum, CEO and co-founder, Zadara Storage Ltd. “We implemented iSER at the core of our Zadara Storage Cloud and have seen a 10x reduction in I/O latency, enabling our VPSA Storage-as-a-Service platform to perform better than traditional enterprise storage arrays.“

“In our testing, iSER enhances data delivery, enabling applications deployed on virtualized infrastructure to realize more performance and lower latency from their data infrastructure,” said Marc Fleischmann, CEO and founder, Datera, Inc. “As a software-defined data platform that enables cloud-independent IT-as-a-Service models for enterprises and cloud-centric businesses, Datera customers can non-disruptively integrate new technologies such as iSER at their own pace.“