StorExpress Integrating Solid State Storage in a PCI Express Clustering Interconnect

Executive Summary Direct PCI Express (PCIe) attached flash storage offers unparalleled performance levels and vastly outperforms SAS/SATA-attached flash storage solutions. However, such PCIe attached flash storage cards, in their existing form, are restricted to the confines of the PCIe slots in the host server. This approach can neither support a disaggregated storage (JBOD/RAID-like) mode that a SAS/SATA-attached storage provides nor can it support a shared storage solution in a clustered environment. By leveraging the expertise in PCIe based clustering and IO expansion technology, Dolphin, in partnership with Fusion-IO, provides an enhanced PCIe flash storage solution in the form of StorExpress – an appliance that augments the high-performing direct PCIe attached storage from Fusion-IO. StorExpress enables a larger capacity by using Fusion-IO's PCIe flash storage cards (iodrives) as building blocks and also provides disaggregation capabilities along the lines of SAS/SATA-attached flash storage. Though the features provided by StorExpress for enhancing a single-host direct attached storage would stand on its own legs, the StorExpress solution goes even further. As a matter of fact, the StorExpress solution is built around Dolphin's PCIe based interconnect technology – one that integrates PCIe-based clustering/IO expansion on a single platform. On the storage front, StorExpress facilitates a high-performing shared storage configuration in a multiple server environment that includes rackmount as well as blade-servers. On the cluster communication front, StorExpress can be seamlessly integrated into Dolphin's PCIe-based clustering environment or can even act as a standalone PCIe clustering switch. And with the aid of Dolphin's software, clustering applications can continue to use legacy APIs (such as TCP/IP-based sockets or MPI) while benefiting from the extremely low-latency and high bandwidth communication afforded by Dolphin's software/hardware solution. Such a tightly knit configuration offers a great potential for improving the performance of applications that require (a) low-latency/high-bandwidth communication and (b) extremely fast storage. StorExpress is ideal for deployment in web and database-centric applications such as web caching, web indexing, data warehousing, data mining and OLTP applications. Such applications demand storage capacities and capabilities that can be met only by traditional HDD based solutions but not with current PCI express based solid state storage solutions. At the same time, those applications demand extremely high performance in the form of low latency and high bandwidth – one that can be met easily by using PCI Express based solid state storage devices. This whitepaper describes some of configurations and usage models supported by Dolphin's …