Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a leading supplier of
high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center
servers and storage systems, today announced a collaborative solution
using VMware Virtual SAN, a hyper-converged storage product, Mellanox’s
10GbE interconnect and Micron’s solid-state drives (SSDs)
that enables a highly efficient Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
deployment.
The solution consists of 3 servers running VMware vSphere and VMware
Virtual SAN, each with one Mellanox ConnectX-3 10GbE NIC, two Micron
1.4TB P420m PCIe solid-state drives and six hard disk drives (HDDs).
Combined, the three servers support 360 Virtual Desktops with less than
5 minutes boot time, significantly reducing the total cost per user.
VMware’s Virtual SAN aggregates locally-attached disks in a vSphere
cluster to create a storage solution that can rapidly be provisioned
from VMware’s vCenter. This simple model saves both time and money
while delivering high-performance with SSD caching.
“We are happy to see the growing adoption of VMware Virtual SAN,” said
Alberto Farronato, director, product marketing at VMware. “We are
pleased that Mellanox and Micron have recognized the advantages that
Virtual SAN enables and have integrated it into their joint VDI
solution.”
Mellanox's scale-out 10/40/56GbE products enable users to benefit from a
far more scalable, lower latency, and virtualized fabric with lower
overall fabric costs and power consumption. These benefits yield greater
efficiencies, and simplifies and streamlines storage management compared
to traditional Ethernet fabrics.
“As the number of worldwide mobile internet users continues to grow
exponentially, IT managers are looking to deploy more efficient VDI
systems to support the growth,” said Kevin Deierling, vice president of
marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “The joint solution enables a
scalable infrastructure that minimizes the cost per virtual desktop
user.”
Micron’s P420m PCIe SSDs combine leading performance, power efficiency,
and a low total cost of ownership to accelerate I/O in enterprise
servers, hot data cache systems, and online transaction processing
applications. It is a logical choice for Virtual SAN implementations,
which all require some element of flash storage.
“VSAN is a key enabler of flash as performance needs are moving more
mainstream across virtualized applications,” said Kevin Dibelius,
director of enterprise storage marketing at Micron. “Pairing our
high-performance storage with Mellanox’s high-bandwidth switches helps
customers maximize system throughput and cost-efficiency, dramatically
improving application performance.”