ACADEMIA

VSA Virtual SAN software appliance enables storage providers and application managers to boost application performance and scalability, while significantly lowering infrastructure costs

VMworld US 2012
At VMworld in San Francisco today, Mellanox Technologies has 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 Mellanox VSA vSAN software appliance has built-in caching and clustering, and utilizes RDMA, InfiniBand and Ethernet hardware acceleration to deliver six-fold faster performance than using Fibre Channel (FC) SAN storage systems. VSA vSAN software appliance reduces the costs of FC SAN adapters, switches, and physical storage systems, while creating unprecedented 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. The VSA vSAN Appliance can also act as a virtual FC SAN gateway, enabling coexistence with and acceleration of existing and legacy FC SANs.

With Mellanox’s VSA vSAN software appliance, a single:

• VM client can achieve 190,000 IOPS and 5 Gigabytes/second bandwidth
• VSA target appliance instance can deliver 6 Gigabytes/second with a single RDMA adapter, and 12 Gigabytes/second 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 environments require shared storage for manageability and mobility, adding significant cost of shared/SAN storage,” said Yaron Haviv, vice president of data center solutions at Mellanox Technologies. “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.”

Live Demonstration and presentations at VMworld 2012 (August 26th - 29th)

The benefits of running VMware ESXi over 40GbE will be presented by VMware’s team at the VMworld 2012 conference (session: TEX2979) on Wednesday, August 29 at 12:30PM.

Visit Mellanox Technologies at booth #2029 to see a live demonstration of Mellanox’s VSA vSAN Appliance, and the full suite of Mellanox’s end-to-end high-performance data center interconnect products.