Mellanox Ethernet Storage Fabric

Data Center Changes

The need for high-performance storage networking is being fueled by rapid deployments of multi-core servers densely packed with virtual machines and a move to all-flash storage arrays capable of blazing speeds. Communication between virtualized servers and ultra-low latency flash-based storage is a challenge for legacy IP and Fibre Channel switching architectures. As a result, there is an increasing demand for an efficient, reliable, storage-aware, high-performance storage network to connect servers and storage. Recent innovations in Ethernet switches are addressing these demands and are keeping pace with new storage trends such as the growing adoption of Cloud and Object storage, an area Fibre Channel does not address. Similarly, an explosion of file and object storage is being driven by distributed local storage from Big Data applications like Hadoop. Furthermore, as IT budgets continue to shrink, storage tiers based on performance requirements and access patterns are becoming more common practice as we are now seeing about 80% of data on secondary storage. The increase in storage types and tiers makes a huge difference in storage planning, because all the file and object storage solutions must use Ethernet (can’t use Fibre Channel). Secondary storage would also go on Ethernet because of the shear expensive of a Fibre Channel SANs. For these reasons, we are seeing Ethernet storage growing rapidly.