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
2
before
after
Similar to VMware Virtual SAN but
3
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
4
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
5
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.
10
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
USA
1-617-449-7717 Main
1-617-507-5845 Fax

www.starwindsoftware.com
sales@starwindsoftware.com