Mellanox Technologies and Micron have announced a collaborative solution to enable higher storage performance and efficiency for virtualised environments using VMware’s ESXi 5.1. The solution consists of Mellanox’s ConnectX-3 40GbE NICs with iSCSI over RDMA (iSER) and Micron’s 1.4TB P420m PCIe SSD cards. By taking advantage of the iSER protocol, Micron’s flash storage solution delivers superior performance, providing virtual machines on a single ESXi 5.1 host with an aggregate bandwidth of 11GB/s or 527,000 IOPS using only two interconnect cards in a 3U box.
‘Selecting the right interconnect technologies is vital when selecting Flash-based storage in a virtualised infrastructure. The performance benefits of Flash can easily get trapped behind slow interconnects,’ said Jared Hulbert, SW research manager at Micron. ‘Mellanox’s 40GbE with the iSER protocol gives virtualised applications access to higher bandwidth and excellent 4KB random throughput that only Flash can provide.’
To evaluate this solution, a Supermicro 6037R-TXRF that supports 10 PCIe Gen3 x8 slots with two Mellanox 40GbE RDMA NICs and 8 Micron 1.4TB P420m PCI SSDs was used.
