Mellanox Technologies has unveiled a storage solution for Windows Server 2016 data center that achieves 1.2Tb/s throughput, enhancing cloud infrastructure performance for a reasonable cost. Â This implementation on Windows Server 2016 aims to maximize speed and performance in network-intensive applications like media streaming and compute clustering, efficiently.
The solution, dubbed Storage Spaces Direct, is a scalable and available software-defined storage product that costs less than traditional SAN or NAS arrays. Its hyper-converged architecture leverages a twelve node cluster for its networking solution, including HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9 servers, Micron Technology, Inc.’s NVMe, and the Mellanox ConnectX-4 RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) NICs, which have all been linked by Mellanox’s Spectrum switch and LinkX cables.
Such a configuration circumvents the common bottlenecks encountered in traditional SAN-based architecture and allows for full and efficient use of the 100GbE bandwidth between enterprise applications and the storage system in Windows Server 2016 with Ethernet networks. The compute and storage traffic run over a single wire in this hyper-converged infrastructure, improving return on investment (ROI) and reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO), and enabling multi-core CPUs to run at full capacity. It also simplifies procurement and deployment while delivering basic features such as caching, storage tiers, and erasure encoding.
As such, Storage Spaces Direct allows users to construct highly scalable storage systems using local storage, capitalizes on performance NVMe SSDs and low-cost SATA SSDs, and eliminates the need for costlier shared storage enclosures.
Siddhartha Roy, manager, principal group program, Microsoft Corp., said: “IT managers need the most efficient hyperconverged data center solution that will enable them to meet the industry’s most demanding application performance while maintaining the lowest possible costs. Using HPE servers, equipped with Micron NVMe SSDs and Mellanox’s end-to-end RoCE networking, has enabled us to achieve performance of 1.2Tb/s data communication bandwidth between the applications to storage, while preserving the low deployment cost.”