Mellanox teams up with Micron to unveil 40GbE Flash Storage Solution

VMWorld 2013 - Today, Mellanox Technologies teamed up with Micron to announce a collaborative solution that enables higher storage performance and efficiency for virtualized environments running VMware's ESXi 5.1. Consisting of Mellanox's ConnectX-3 40GbE NICs with iSCSI over RDMA (iSER) and Micron's 1.4TB P420m PCIe SSD cards, this new solution takes advantage of the iSER protocol and allows Micron's flash storage to deliver superior performance.

Mellanox and Micron say that this combo, when ran on a single ESXi 5.1 host, can deliver an aggregate bandwidth of 11GB/s or 527,000 IOPS using only two interconnect cards in a 3U box. The companies evaluated the solution on a Supermicro 6037R-TXRF that supports 10 PCIe Gen3 x8 slots with two Mellanox 40GbE RDMA NICs and 8 Micron 1.4TB P420m PCI SSDs.

"Selecting the right interconnect technologies is vital when selecting Flash-based storage in a virtualized infrastructure. The performance benefits of Flash can easily get trapped behind slow interconnects," said Jared Hulbert, SW Research Manager at Micron. "Mellanox's 40GbE with the iSER protocol gives virtualized applications access to higher bandwidth and excellent 4KB random throughput that only Flash can provide."

"The combined solution of Mellanox's 40GbE NICs with iSER and Micron's P420m PCIe SSD enables higher performance and accelerates storage applications running in virtualized environments," said Yaron Haviv, vice president data center solutions at Mellanox Technologies. "In addition, by consolidating compute and storage traffic over a single-wire infrastructure reduces data center complexity and cost."