StarWind Virtual SAN

• an entirely software-based, VM-centric virtual machine storage, which

basically “mirrors” internal hard disk and flash memory between

hypervisor hosts

• software which eliminates any need for physical shared storage like SAS

JBODs, iSCSI, Fibre Channel or NAS and seamlessly integrates into the

hypervisor

StarWind Virtual SAN is…

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before after

Similar to VMware Virtual SAN but…

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• Has an absolutely minimalistic hardware footprint – needing only

two physical hosts running VMware vSphere hypervisor and literally no

other hardware (flash is optional)

• Flash-friendly – it uses Log-Structured File System (LSFS), in-line

Deduplication and RAM-based L1 cache to help flash last longer

eliminating small writes, reducing amount of written data and

adsorbing writes in RAM

Similar to Microsoft Clustered Storage Spaces but…

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• Has flexed-out hardware requirements starting with just two

physical hosts running Hyper-V, no additional and external hardware is

required: no SAS JBODs, SAS HBAs cabling, FC, iSCSI or SMB 3.0.

Works not only with SAS but with SATA and PCIe flash memory.

10/40/56 Gb Ethernet is used for connections, instead of 6/12 Gb SAS.

• Adds In-line Deduplication and LSFS log structure targeting VDI

and write intensive VMs and is Flash-friendly due to the amount of

written data reduced in real time thus prolonging flash life

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• Runs inside Hyper-V kernel and uses SMB 3.0 SOFS, iSCSI and Scale-

Out File Servers approaches to fit storage.

It also uses RAM and PCIe based write back cache to adsorb

writes and cache I/O.

Similar to Microsoft Clustered Storage Spaces but…

Hyper-Converged

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• Natural part of the hypervisor, either kernel or VM based

• High performance with all major virtualization platforms, like Microsoft

Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, due to reducing I/O path, reads and

writes go locally and server side running RAM and flash cache.

• Support of non-virtualized clusters typically deployed for performance-

intensive SQL Server, Exchange, Oracle and SAP installations and

Scale-Out File Servers, SMB 3.0, NFS general purpose file servers

Compute and Storage Separated

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• Possibility to run on a dedicated set of servers creating separated

storage pools, while for some installation a high LUN density is required.

Implemented for total flexibility of different configurations to increase

compute and storage layers performance with not only one means.

• Uses industry standard uplink protocols SMB 3.0, NFS, iSCSI and

hypervisor specific I/O acceleration technologies VAAI and ODX.

Scale-Up & Scale-Out

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Flexible adoption of both Scale-Up and Scale-Out architectures

• capacity is increased by throwing more spindles or flash modules

into the existing storage cluster

nodes,

• storage and compute

capacity is increased by adding

additional nodes.

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• Fault Tolerance and High Availability

Basically “mirroring” of the actual storage and caches between the hosts.

Any number of replicas of a particular VM or LUN are kept alive and the

cluster uses required number of active storage controllers.

• VM-Centric Storage

A combination of RAM and Flash as multi-layered cache is used to eliminate

random reads, thus achieving major performance increase. Multiple smaller

random writes are coalesced into a single sequential big I/O write.

Implementation of Log-Structured File system (LSFS) allows to achieve up

to 90% raw sequential write performance at the file system level.

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• Hardware Agnostic

The utilization of inexpensive commodity hardware with the help of

proprietary in-house developed software, general-purpose x64 servers,

MLC flash, spinning disks and Ethernet, thus making a high-

performance solution affordable.

• Asynchronous replication

An effective mechanism to ensure that mission-critical business data is

replicated to a disaster recovery site. Replication is implemented to be

asynchronous, background, deduplication and compression-aware as

well as snapshot-based to reduce load on slow WAN connection.

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• Snapshots and Automated Storage Tiering

Implementing of inter-node tiering technology to offload “cold” data

from fast and expensive primary all-flash storage to slower but

inexpensive secondary storage tier.

• Deduplication and compression

Utilization of VM and flash-friendly space reduction technologies such

as in-line deduplication and compression, increasing usable capacity of

all-flash configurations and also prolonging flash life-cycle.

301 Edgewater Place,Suite 100,Wakefield, MA 01880

USA1-617-449-7717 Main1-617-507-5845 Fax

www.starwindsoftware.com

sales@starwindsoftware.com