Voltaire Storage Accelerator™ (VSA™)

Voltaire Storage Accelerator (VSA) software is a highly scalable, high performance, low latency software solution for tier one storage and gateways that provides ultra-fast remote block storage access and accelerates access to SAN, DAS, or Flash based storage.

Recent exponential growth in CPU capacities and core counts means that many applications are now inhibited by I/O speed, and increased data center consolidation and virtualization is creating random storage access patterns that result in poor storage performance. To address these I/O performance challenges, VSA provides highly optimized storage transport engine, and a scale-out design that can maximize throughput and process many transactions in parallel — and with very little I/O overhead and access time.

Delivering Ultra-Fast Storage Access Using Commodity Hardware

A VSA storage cluster can process many millions of transactions per second, deliver hundreds of GB/s of data, and speed access time by a factor of 100X over traditional storage, leading to far greater application performance at lower costs and power. In addition, VSA can be deployed across industry standard storage servers or appliances, preserving existing hardware investments.

VSA improves performance of applications that require rapid access to data such as persistent messaging systems in financial services, analytics, databases and data warehouses, and high-performance computing. For cloud providers or VMware ESX users, VSA significantly boosts virtual machine performance and eliminates I/O delays and boot storms, while reducing storage costs. In addition, VSA provides central management access that enables CLI based management for multiple VSA storage servers.

VSA access time (latency) and IOPs compared to traditional storage systems

Enabling Fabric Consolidation

VSA reduces data center costs and complexity by enabling fabric convergence. 10GbE and/or 40Gb/s InfiniBand-based clients can use VSA as a fast fibre channel (FC) gateway and storage cache, and to access remote FC storage without FC HBAs or FC access switches. Hundreds of virtual FC HBAs/ports can be provisioned with a single VSA-based gateway appliance (allocated to virtual or physical 10GbE or InfiniBand clients), while also boosting storage access performance.

Voltaire Storage Accelerator Architecture

VSA’s zero-copy architecture leverages RDMA, allowing it to saturate the server I/O buses and deliver more than 5GB/s of bandwidth per storage server/gateway. The software incorporates multiple ultra-fast datamover engine processes. These communicate directly with the NIC/HCA hardware and leverage hardware offload capabilities to process the storage transactions. This enables unprecedented IOPs performance and a very low access time of only a few dozen microseconds end-to-end. VSA datamover engines communicate with a services layer that delivers caching, RAID, multipath, and I/O virtualization. Users can deploy a cluster of VSA servers with a combination of DAS, SAN, and Flash storage, and achieve the aggregate performance and capacity.

Manageability and Usability

Multiple VSA appliances are managed as a cluster with unified CLI and management. The VSA cluster manager provides central resources and hierarchy discovery, automated configuration for network and storage elements, central monitoring and logging, and secure role-based remote access. VSA is also integrated with Voltaire’s Unified Fabric Manager™ (UFM™) software allowing central remote discovery, monitoring, and configuration.

Typical VSA-enabled set-up