Storage Accelerator (VSA) and Virtual SAN Appliance

Overview

Mellanox's Storage Accelerator (VSA) software is a highly scalable, high-performance, low-latency software solution for tier-one storage and gateways that provides ultra-fast remote block storage access and accelerates access to SAN, DAS, or Flash-based storage.

Recent exponential growth in CPU capacities and core counts means that many applications are now inhibited by I/O speed, and increased data center consolidation and virtualization is creating random storage access patterns that result in poor storage performance. To address these I/O performance challenges, VSA provides a highly optimized storage transport engine, and a scale-out design that can maximize throughput and process many transactions in parallel — all with very little I/O overhead and access time.

VSA Virtual SAN Appliance

Virtualized environments can also benefit from VSA with the Virtual SAN Appliance solution. With the release of VMware ESX 5.1, including SR-IOV functionality, VSA can run as a VMware virtual machine, allowing other virtual machines in the environment to access virtualized local and non-local storage at blazing speeds, and accelerating application performance significantly for faster results and increased equipment ROI.


Related Documents

  • Up to a million I/Os per second and 5,000 MB/s per physical storage target
  • Only 0.07 millisecond access time
  • Read and write storage cache
  • Raid 0/1, Multipath, and Replication
  • High-availability and scale-out design with integrated cluster management
  • Significantly improves application performance and response time
  • Greater performance and scalability with lower costs and power consumption
  • Easy to manage and monitor
  • Preserves existing storage investments