SAN FRANCISCO– Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, and LSI have announced the results of a collaborative solution for enabling greater virtual desktop density per server using VMware Horizon View. The combined low-latency solution consists of a Mellanox 40GbE NICs and the LSI Nytro MegaRAID application acceleration card that uniquely integrates onboard flash capacity with intelligent caching software and hard drive RAID management. The integrated application acceleration solution is designed to provide a lower cost alternative to traditional storage solutions. With a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workload, the joint solution supports up to 1,500 desktops across 10 vSphere servers with a hardware MSRP of less than $25,000.
“Providing acceptable response times to virtual desktop users while maximizing the number of desktop sessions per server can be challenging,” said Manish Muthal, vice president of product management and strategy, Accelerated Solutions Division, LSI Corporation. “The low-latency LSI Nytro MegaRAID card, combined with Mellanox’s 40GbE NICs, delivers an intelligent and cost-effective VDI solution compared to all-flash solutions that can cost upwards of $100K.”
“Mellanox 40GbE interconnects teamed with LSI PCIe flash cards optimizes VDI environments and provides unmatched cost-performance benefits.” said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “The hardware offload capabilities embedded in our 40GbE NICs overcome the limitations of ordinary TCP/IP interconnects, thereby allowing servers to efficiently connect to the storage subsystem and take full advantage of the performance of flash storage in a VDI environment, and eliminates redundant and costly SAN infrastructure.”
“A high density VDI environment can benefit from low latency storage,” said Mason Uyeda, senior director, technical marketing, End-User Computing, VMware. “This solution demonstrates the potential performance of an economical enterprise-class implementation using VMware Horizon View.”
To evaluate this solution supporting a VMware Horizon View environment, a pair of white box servers was used with the Mellanox 40GbE end-to-end solution and LSI Nytro card. Since enterprise environments demand no single point of failure, the performance overhead of supporting a highly available configuration was measured. A detailed paper on tested configuration is available at http://www.mellanox.com/related-docs/whitepapers/SB_Virtual_Desktop_Infrastructure_Storage_Acceleration_Final.pdf.
