Microsoft and Intel Achieve One Million IO/s in iSCSI Performance

StarWind Software, Inc. announced that its StarWind iSCSI SAN software was used in the iSCSI performance tests by Microsoft and Intel which achieved one million I/Os per second (IOPS).

For storage Microsoft and Intel used StarWind iSCSI SAN software at 10 Gbps. Additionally, Intel and Microsoft used the following configuration: Intel Xeon Server Processor W5580, Windows Server 2008 R2 x64, and Intel Ethernet 10GbE Server Adapters to deliver breakthrough performance and new I/O and iSCSI features. They also used Microsoft’s iSCSI initiator software and Hyper-V with 10 VMs and 2GB allocated RAM. Network Configuration included Cisco’s 10GbE Nexus 5020 switch connected to ten iSCSI targets.

"We thank Microsoft and Intel for using StarWind iSCSI SAN software to build iSCSI storage for this groundbreaking test to achieve 1 million IOPS at Intel labs," said Zorian Rotenberg, President and CEO of StarWind Software. "We are grateful that our product was part of this major breakthrough in iSCSI networking performance. We have had a good relationship for the past few years with the Microsoft storage team so our iSCSI SAN software works well for building storage for Hyper-V virtual machines and now we look forward to working more closely with Intel and their Ethernet technologies."

StarWind’s SAN software is used to convert a standard, Intel-architecture x86 or x64 server into a fail-safe, fault-tolerant SAN that will be online and accessible even in the event of failure. Ideal for virtualization environments, StarWind’s true active-active high availability (HA) storage architecture provides continuous and non-disruptive access to storage in the event of failure by synchronously mirroring data between two active storage appliances in real time.