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Chelsio box-o-SSDs does 1.1 million IOPS

JBOSSD di tutti JBOSSD

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Chelsio, a network adapter card supplier, will demo a 1.1 million IOPS SAN array at SNW Dallas.

They make it sound easy. All you stuff is stuff four Micron P320h PCIe SSDs in a box, add a Chelsio 10GbitE T4 unified wire adapter, and its Unified Storage Server (USS) software running, presumably, on an X86 processor. This is the iSCSI target. Hook up five iSCSI initiators running MS Windows 2008 R2 accessing the iSCSI target through a generic 10GbE switch and - hey presto! - 1.1 million IOPS.

This is an extraordinary performance from what is, effectively, a JBOSSD - just a bunch of SSDs - and Chelsio is pleased as punch.

“The combination of Chelsio USS software and offload silicon technology and SSDs shatters the expectations of what a customer would have to pay for a million IOPS storage solution,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio.

Well, yes, that's true. The USS software supports CIFS, NFS, RDMA, HTTP, Thin Provisioning volumes, Volume cloning, snapshots, instant restore from snapshots, volume encryption and replication compression. What's missing? Did anyone say deduplication?

No matter. Any old reseller with system smarts could build such a box and offer small/medium enterprises storage performance that would knock them out. Think what sophisticated system builders could do. ®

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@Jake and Morg

As I read the story it was the iSCSI initiators that ran Win2k8r2 not the target, which runs their USS software (some cooked Linux distro?)

I imagine the reason there are 4 of the p320h SSD's is to stretch performance from 750k IOps each to 1m+ for the array and to add some fault tolerance.

Perhaps I didn't understand and should re-read the story again.

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Windows is the CLIENT

Earlier commentards: You do realise the Windows is the CLIENT here don't you? Running iSCSI initiator? The initiator might as well be Linux, BSD, OSX, VMWare, whatever - I suspect they chose Windows because it's visually easy to use in a demonstration. The actual spec of the storage box makes ZERO mention of using Windows to run it, it uses their USS software.

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Anonymous Coward

Re: @Jake and Morg

Win 2008 R2 is a perfectly decent server if you use it for the right things... hard to replicate the full features of a 2008R2 domain controller with a non-WIndows OS for example. And if you need network drives rather than just have some SMB NAS unit you might mount an iSCSI volume so you can make good use of DFS namespaces etc.

Windows AND Linux have a place in sensible pragmatic IT, anti-Microsoft zealot-ism is just immature really.

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