InfiniBand
The Cloud with Maximum I/O
Access to high-performance storage has been one of the principal limitations of virtualized environments, as multiple virtual machines trying to access shared storage over a physical servers storage connections introduces a performance-limiting bottleneck. Because of this, Logicworks has been at the forefront of the Cloud industry by offering InfiniBand, a technology developed in supercomputing applications, which provides a 40Gb/s path between hosts and storage systems.
InfiniBand is a switched fabric communications link that has traditionally been used primarily in high-performance computing. Its features include high quality of service and failover, as well as its inherently scalable design. It is fast becoming a regular in datacenter deployments, and any protocol that uses RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) greatly benefits from InfiniBands extremely high speeds and low latency.
The Logicworks Cloud uses SRP targets which utilize read caching for frequently requested data. The failover process for SRP is extremely efficient, with almost unnoticeable interruption of reads/writes due to InfiniBand and SRP being multi-pathed. Just like in fibre channel, there can be multiple paths to a particular LUN. The targets (drbd replicated) are run in active/active mode with initiators connecting to one of the nodes, which will automatically failover in the event of a target or path failure. This process has been tested to work in under 5 seconds. Logicworks sets up, monitors, and manages all failover and restoration aspects of DRBD so that the end result is that the client has a redundant storage setup and will ensure the availability of its virtual servers despite any hardware failure.
With redundant VMware and storage nodes, this creates an environment that is fault-tolerant at every level. Approaching infrastructure in this manner also affords for a much greater degree of flexibility. This solution is unique in that it can not only be scaled out with additional ESX servers, but it is also possible to scale storage capacity with additional DRBD storage server pairs as needed.
