Mellanox rips covers off virt-SAN beast, claims Fibre Channel vanquish

InfiniBand vendor Mellanox has demonstrated a Fibre Channel-beating virtual SAN appliance at VMworld, claiming it's six times faster than FC SANs. Virtual SAN appliances (VSAs) are becoming more serious. They started out as SAN try-outs using server SW and the server's local disks to produce a shared block-access storage area …

[thegreatsatan]

child please

Start doing the math on some of the components listed in the 'vSan" to get that "6X" performance and you will quickly realize that the costs involved start to add up very quickly. Lets also ignore the fact that not every system connecting to storage is virtual. Mellanox loves to lead with extreme claims, but the devil is usually in the details.

Honestly these kind of advertisements masquerading as articles don't lend a lot of credibility to the Reg. Instead of just regurgitating the press release, maybe actually do a little digging and report.

[Anonymous Coward]

Plaything...

If I'm reading that slide right, your options are RAID-0 or RAID-1 only? That's a plaything.

[Nate Amsden]

is this new?

I recall coming across this VSA I want to say about a year ago. Though maybe it was from someone other than Mellanox, but I don't think it was.

[Levente Szileszky]

"5GB/sec bandwidth per storage target"

If it's indeed based on a single Fusion-IO card then Mellanox is full of it unless they suggest striping them which would be the most idiotic idea ever.

Either way it makes little sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "5GB/sec bandwidth per storage target"

Marketing does not have to make sense. If it was popular at VM World clueless CIOs will buy it and ignore any of the complaints from technical staff when they try to duplicate the vendor's performance claims. Anything with the word "virtual" in it seems to sell nowadays.

[Morabe]

RDMA enables faster storage access

The 5GB/sec was demoed live at VMworld, using several Fusion-IO cards (to provide the BW). Also,,the new SMB protocol in Windows Server 2012 includes support for InfiniBand and RoCE network adapters, which outperform Fibre Channel (~6GB/sec at less than 5% CPU overhead using one Infiniabnd linke or ~17GB/sec when using 3 links, also demoed live in TechEd'12).