Using PCIe SSDs to the limit. StarWind teamed up with Mellanox, Intel, and Supermicro to build the fastest hyperconverged cluster ever

MIDDLETON, Mass. - EntSun -- StarWind, Intel, Mellanox, and Supermicro present the industry's fastest hyperconverged cluster built to demonstrate outstanding hardware utilization efficiency.

StarWind, a leading provider of hyperconverged IT environments for SMB and ROBO, conjoined its effort with the leading hardware vendors to build a large environment capable of delivering enough performance to break the current industry speed record. The similar setup was used before by Microsoft to set its HCI industry high score. The only difference is that we managed to squeeze maximum performance out of the underlying storage thanks to the effective symbiosis of hardware and software.

By building such environment, StarWind, Supermicro, Mellanox, and Intel demonstrated that HCI performance high scores should be not about IOPS but more about efficient hardware utilization. Every time faster disks will appear, others may chinch higher number of IOPS just because their storage may be more powerful by design or there may be more drives in servers. However, the only thing that matters in this race is hardware utilization efficiency. Moneywise, this means that you can get all the IOPS that you paid for. What's the use of an all-flash array that provides you only a mere fraction of the performance that you expect? Remember: the number of IOPS that you can squeeze from the underlying storage is minute, hardware utilization efficiency is eternal.

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Production-ready StarWind HyperConverged Appliances built on Supermicro SuperServer chassis were used for the test setup. We used Mellanox ConnectX-5 NICs and Mellanox SN2700 Spectrum 100GbE switches for interconnect. The only thing that made the servers in our test environment different from ones that we spec was Intel Platinum processors – the top-notch CPUs provided by Intel.

About StarWind

StarWind a virtualization pioneer focused on delivering Software-Defined Storage and HyperConverged Infrastructure solutions designed to build high-performing, flexible, and resilient IT infrastructures for SMB and ROBO. Founded in 2009, StarWind has spread remarkably over the globe and helped to build virtualization infrastructures for over 140,000 free users and more than 4,000 paying customers around the world.

About Supermicro

Supermicro is a global leader in high-efficiency server technology and innovation that develops and provides end-to-end green computing solutions to datacenter, cloud computing, enterprise IT, big data, HPC, and embedded markets. Supermicro SuperServers used in our study are nothing but the "Linux" of hardware platforms.

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About Mellanox

Mellanox Technologies is a leading supplier of end-to-end interconnect solutions and services for servers, storage, and hyperconverged infrastructure. Mellanox intelligent interconnect solutions increase datacenter efficiency by providing the highest throughput, delivering data transfer to applications, and unlocking system performance.

About Intel

Being known for its powerful CPUs, Intel provides various solutions for cloud computing, real-time analytics, mission-critical data processing. These days, Intel develops both hardware and software, but blazing fast storage and CPUs still remain its main focus. Intel Optane drives used in our study are nothing but the fastest storage to date.