Microsoft Based Solutions

Accelerating Remote Storage Access - Breakthrough Performance, Scaling and Resiliency

The exponential growth and the availability of data forces organization to build and deploy infrastructure that enables their businesses to thrive in this new era. To meet these dynamic and growing demands Microsoft has released an advanced set of features introduced in Windows Server 2016 with support for Microsoft Azure Stack. Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) adds the concept of pooling affordable drives form shareable storage and also introduced RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) to access data without burdening the CPU. In doing so, they offer a new way to deploy scalable and cost-effective storage while offloading IO processing to the network. This increases the server‘s efficiency since the CPU becomes available to run applications, and thus reduces the number of servers required to support a given workload.

With Mellanox RoCE the performance of a Storage Spaces Direct implementations doubles and CPU burdens shrink, enabling significantly higher efficiency in Windows-based data centers. Data accessed over RoCE enable:

• Increased throughput: leverages the full throughput of high speed networks in which the network adapters coordinate the transfer of large amounts of data at line speed.
• Low latency: provides extremely fast responses to network requests, and, as a result, makes remote file storage feel as if it is directly attached block storage.
• Low CPU utilization: uses fewer CPU cycles when transferring data over the network, which leaves more power available to server applications.

As enterprises move to public cloud offerings, they also recognize that certain workloads will remain on-premises, and need an easy and cost-effective solution to seamlessly connect these two worlds. Microsoft Azure Stack provides this in a hybrid cloud storage solution. With Azure Stack, organizations can achieve their goal of connecting traditional infrastructure to the Azure cloud. By utilizing the advantages of S2D and Mellanox RoCE enabled adapters and switches, Azure Stack provides more efficient and faster access to data and transforms enterprise data centers by boost performance and agility of enterprise applications.