SCIENCE

Voltaire has announced a new software solution that provides ultra-fast remote block storage access over a 10 GbE or InfiniBand fabric. The software can be deployed over industry standard servers to enable high-performance x86-based storage or gateways.

Voltaire Storage Accelerator (VSA) software enables a storage server pair to process up to a million I/O operations per second (IOPS) and deliver more than 10 GB/s of data. A unified cluster of storage servers using VSA instantly becomes capable of delivering tens of millions of transactions per second that can be shared among any server in the fabric. VSA software speeds access time by a factor of 100X over traditional storage systems, leading to far greater application performance at lower costs and using significantly less space.

VSA improves performance of applications that require rapid access to data such as persistent messaging systems in financial services, analytics, data warehousing and high-performance computing. For cloud computing and environments running VMware ESX, VSA can boost virtual machine performance, and eliminate I/O delays and boot storms, while significantly reducing storage costs.

Voltaire's portfolio of scale-out 10 GbE and InfiniBand switches, management and application acceleration software is focused on delivering performance and efficiency in the consolidated datacenter by accelerating applications while improving infrastructure utilization and reducing space and power requirements. VSA software is the newest addition to the portfolio and addresses the last bottleneck in fabric performance: storage I/O.

"There have been many recent advancements in storage throughput with the advent of SSDs and other technologies, so now the challenge becomes how to drive this mega-capacity over the network," said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "VSA solves this challenge and enables IT organizations to build their own high-performance storage system with off the shelf components. This is the storage solution cloud providers have been waiting for."

In a recent benchmark test conducted by Voltaire and Fusion-io, VSA with a single industry-standard 1U storage server using Fusion-io ioDrive Duo drives produced close to 500,000 IOPS and delivered more than 5 GB/s of throughput.

VSA is installed on standard Linux storage servers and can front end DAS (SAS/SATA), SAN (FC/iSCSI), Flash or RAM-based storage. VSA ensures that the storage devices can be accessed in parallel over the fabric at speeds that are a few magnitudes faster than any SAN technology, while providing iSCSI management semantics for ease of use. In addition, VSA can be deployed as a tier zero storage cache in front of slower DAS or FC SAN storage systems, or to provide Fibre Channel I/O virtualization allowing fabric consolidation and eliminating the need for Fibre Channel HBAs.

Availability

VSA software is available now. More information is available at www.voltaire.com/vsa.