QLogic Bringing Out Mt. Rainier Project

QLogic Corp. announced a technology that combines its SAN HBA technology with server-based, industry-standard SS flash storage.

The Mt. Rainier project brings server-based SSD caching performance to SAN storage, simplifying deployment and management while delivering scalable performance to I/O hungry applications running in single and clustered server environments.
 
Application performance has become a critical, competitive advantage for organisations and has a direct impact on customer satisfaction, service levels and overall business performance. Application-transparent and infrastructure- and storage subsystem-agnostic, Mt. Rainier delivers the application performance acceleration benefits of server-based SSDs without many of the limitations of current solutions.

Innovations in Mt. Rainier include:

• Simplified deployment and management: It does not require installation and management of separate drivers for I/O adapters, SSD cards and caching. The design uses only one QLogic driver per OS which  simplifies installation and management, particularly for servers running multiple VMs and clustered applications.
• Flexible hardware architecture: It allows customers to connect different SSDs, including PCIe flash-based storage cards and industry-standard SAS SSDs.
• Adapter-based caching and SSD data management: Mt. Rainier cache processing and SSD data management are offloaded from the server to the Mt. Rainier adapter, resulting in an application-transparent and OS-independent server-based SSD caching solution that provides scalable acceleration of critical server applications without consuming additional server resources.
• Shared caching: Many clustered enterprise applications and virtual server environments require shared storage resources. These applications typically cannot take advantage of server-based SSD solutions that utilize a direct-attached storage model because cached data is unavailable for sharing between multiple, physical servers. Mt. Rainier breaks the server captive cache model with a shared caching architecture that brings the benefits of server-based SSD performance acceleration to multi-server application configurations that benefit from the shared storage environments of SANs.
• HA synchronous mirroring: Synchronous peer-to-peer mirroring across two Mt. Rainier adapters protects against data loss and ensures high availability for mission-critical applications.

"Increased server performance, higher VM density, growth in application clusters and more demanding business application workloads have created a critical I/O performance imbalance between servers, networks and storage subsystems," said Simon Biddiscombe, president and CEO, QLogic. "Mt. Rainier builds on our leading market position and unique expertise in high performance data centre connectivity to bring a new category of scalable, performance-enhancing solutions that are easy to deploy and address some of the most performance-challenged environments in the data centre."
 
"Current caching solutions require separate device drivers for SAN HBAs, SSD cards, and additional caching filter drivers and software," said Shishir Shah, SVP and GM, Storage Solutions Group, QLogic. "Mt. Rainier is flexible technology that  combines the benefits of server-based SSD caching with SAN-based storage using a standard QLogic driver. We’ve created a shared SAN resource model for industry-standard SSDs in the server that leverages existing SAN storage and infrastructure."
 
"Storage performance has long been one of the most pervasive challenges in the data centre," said Jeff Boles, senior analyst at Taneja Group. "Over the past several decades, compute power has simply leapt past the ability of SAN storage to keep up. QLogic’s Mt. Rainier defines a new technology category we call Server-based Storage Accelerators, in which HBAs cache SAN data on server-based SSD storage in a transparent, shared architecture. With QLogic’s global presence and innovative architecture, Mt. Rainier could well become the de facto choice for solving I/O challenges in every data centre."
 
Mt. Rainier technology will be initially deployed and managed as a traditional SAN HBA, providing connectivity to FC SANs (10GbE, iSCSI and FCoE in the future).