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QLogic Announces New Adapter Technology that Simplifies Server-based SSD Caching
Mt. Rainier Project is a Breakthrough in Enterprise Application Acceleration,
Bringing Transparent Server-based Caching to the SAN Using Industry-standard SSDs
ALISO VIEJO, Calif, September 6, 2012” QLogic (Nasdaq: QLGC) today announced new technology that seamlessly combines its market-leading storage area network (SAN) host bus adapter (HBA) technology with server-based, industry-standard solid-state drive (SSD) flash storage.
The Mt. Rainier technology brings server-based SSD caching performance to SAN storage, simplifying deployment and management while delivering scalable performance to I/O hungry, revenue-generating applications running in single and clustered server environments.
Application-transparent, OS-independent and infrastructure- and storage subsystem-agnostic, Mt. Rainier delivers the application performance acceleration benefits of server-based SSDs without the limitations of current solutions.
New breakthrough innovations include:
– Simplified deployment and management: Mt. Rainier does not require installation and
management of separate drivers for I/O adapter, SSD cards and caching. The design uses only one
lightweight QLogic adapter driver which dramatically simplifies installation and management,
particularly for servers running multiple virtual machines and clustered applications.
– Flexible hardware architecture: Allows customers to connect different SSDs, including PCIe flashbased storage cards and industry standard SAS SSDs.
– Transparent shared caching: Many clustered enterprise applications and virtual server environments require shared storage resources. These applications typically cannot take advantage of server-based SSD solutions that utilize a direct-attached storage model in which cached data is unavailable for sharing between multiple, physical servers. Mt. Rainier breaks the captive server cache model with a server-transparent, shared caching architecture that brings the benefits of serverside SSD performance acceleration to multi-server application environments that benefit from the shared storage resource environments of SANs.
– Adapter-based caching and SSD data management: Mt. Rainier cache processing and SSD data
management is offloaded from the server to the Mt. Rainier adapter, resulting in an application transparent and operating system-independent server-side SSD caching solution that provides scalable acceleration of critical server applications without consuming additional server resources.
– High availability synchronous mirroring: Synchronous peer-to-peer mirroring across two Mt.
Rainier adapters protects against data loss and ensures high availability for mission-critical
applications.
Increased server performance, higher virtual machine density, growth in application clusters and more demanding business application workloads have created a critical I/O performance imbalance between servers, networks and storage subsystems, said Simon Biddiscombe, president and chief executive officer, QLogic. Mt. Rainier builds on our leading market position and unique expertise in high performance data center connectivity to bring a new category of scalable, performance-enhancing solutions that are easy to deploy and address some of the most performance-challenged environments in the data center.
Current caching solutions require separate device drivers for SAN HBAs, SSD cards, and additional
caching filter drivers and software, said Shishir Shah, senior vice president and general manager,
Storage Solutions Group, QLogic. Mt. Rainier is a flexible technology platform that seamlessly combines the benefits of server-based SSD caching with SAN-based storage using a standard QLogic driver. Weve created a shared SAN resource model for industry standard SSDs in the server that leverages existing SAN storage and infrastructure.
Industry Analyst:
Storage performance has long been one of the most pervasive challenges in the data center, said Jeff Boles, senior analyst at Taneja Group. Over the past several decades, compute power has simply leapt past the ability of SAN storage to keep up. QLogics Mt. Rainier defines a new technology category we call Server-based Storage Accelerators, in which HBAs cache SAN data on server-based SSD storage in a transparent, shared architecture. With QLogics global datacenter presence and innovative architecture, Mt. Rainier could well become the de facto choice for solving I/O challenges in every datacenter.
Mt. Rainier technology will be deployed and managed as a traditional SAN HBA, providing connectivity to Fibre Channel SANs (10GbE iSCSI and FCoE in the future).