The Solution Demonstrates the Performance Boost Achieved When Running Storage Spaces Direct with Servers Equipped with NVMe Cards and Connected over 100Gb Ethernet

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ:MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced that the company will be showcasing a new Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct Demo at the Samsung Booth No. 307, at this week’s Flash Memory Summit. The demo runs over a four-node cluster, each node equipped with four of Samsung’s NVMe cards and two of Mellanox’s ConnectX-4 100GbE RDMA-enabled NICs, which are connected by Mellanox’s Spectrum 2700 100GbE switch and LinkX cables. The solution delivers a total of 80GB/s bandwidth; representing more than 90 percent of the accumulating bandwidth that the NVMe cards can deliver locally to the servers.

“As users continue to deploy larger and larger clusters that are connected over Ethernet only, the efficiency of today’s data centers depends heavily on networking capabilities,” said Motti Beck, senior director of Enterprise marketing, at Mellanox Technologies. “This demo by Samsung and Mellanox represents yet another proof point that higher performance networking enables faster data communication, and that offloading the network stack processing from the CPU to the IO is the optimal solution to deploy.”

“Applications today need the right storage to process large amounts of data efficiently and to meet the nonstop demand for data,” said Jaeyoung Choi, Director, Memory Product Planning, Samsung Semiconductor Inc. “Using Storage Spaces Direct with Samsung’s NVMe SSD helps to meet critical high-volume performance and efficiency requirements with confidence.”

“Using 4 Samsung PM1725 NVMe SSDs per node connected by Mellanox 100GbE Spectrum switch, ConnectX-4 and cables, the cluster was able to achieve more than 80GB/s of throughput. Or about 750MB/s for each of the 112 virtual machines used, which is about one CD per second per VM,” said Siddhartha Roy, Group Program Manager, Windows Server High Availability and Storage, Microsoft.
Flash Memory Summit is being held this week, Aug. 8-11, Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, California.

Source: Mellanox
with Business Wire