Last week I was at Storage Networking World in Orlando, Florida. The sessions were a lot better organized with focus on all the popular topics like Cloud Computing, Storage Virtualization and Solid State Storage (SSD). In our booth, we demonstrated our Layer 2 agnostic storage supporting iSCSI, FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) and SRP (SCSI RDMA Protocol) all coexisting in a single network. We partnered with Rorke Data who demonstrated a 40Gb/s InfiniBand-based storage array and Texas Memory System’s ‘World’s Fastest Storage’ in our booth demonstrating sustained rates of 3Gb/s and over 400K I/Os using Solid State Drives.
I attended few of the sessions on the SSD and Cloud Computing stream. SSD was my favorite topic primarily because InfiniBand and SSD together will provide the highest storage performance and has the potential to carve out a niche in the data center OLTP applications market. Clod Barrera, IBM’s Chief Technical Storage Strategist’s presentation on SSD was very good. He had a chart which talked about how HDD I/O rates per GByte had dropped so low and currently staying constant at around 150 to 200 I/Os per drive. On the contrary SSD’s have capability to produce 50K I/Os on Read and 17K I/Os on Write. Significant synergy can be achieved by combining SSD with InfiniBand technology. InfiniBand delivers the lowest latency of sub 1us and the highest bandwidth of 40Gb/s. The combination of these technologies will provide significant value in the datacenter and has the potential to change the database and OLTP storage infrastructure.
SSD over InfiniBand delivers:
- Ultra-fast, lowest latency infrastructure for transaction processing applications
- Delivering a more compelling Green per GB
- Faster recovery time for business continuity applications
- Disruptive scaling
I see lot of opportunity for InfiniBand technology in the storage infrastructure as SSD provides the much needed discontinuity to the rotary media.
TA Ramanujam (TAR)
tar@mellanox.com
