E4 Virtual Storage

E4 Virtual Storage is the solution with hyper convergent architecture on the Virtual SAN platform from VMware.

On October 16, 2015 the E4 Computer Engineering company announced creation of hyper convergent architecture on the basis of hardware technologies. The development purpose - achievement of outstanding performance measures.

According to the statement of vendor, this first solution with hyper convergent architecture on the Virtual SAN platform from VMware in which the technologies of VMware, HGST, Mellanox, best in the class, Avago integrated on the E4 servers of industry standard x86 are used.

The hardware and software system Virtual Storage consists of a NVMe-disk from HGST and Virtual SAN from VMware working at E4 basis.

The purpose of creation of such configuration in obtaining the results exceeding the existing standards of performance (the number of transactions of input-output per second (IOPs), network transmission capacity and a disk) when using hyper convergent architecture where instead of normal SAN the defined storage system is used programmatically.

To raise capacity indicators, integrated a number of components which were not tested earlier into a system: VMware Virtual SAN 6.1, a NVMe-disk from HGST, Mellanox 40 Gb Ethernet, the Avago LSI controller on servers of industry standard x86 E4 on the Intel platform.

The solution is optimized so that each component showed results above the standard level:

• VMware Virtual SAN 6.1 provided such level of virtualization of infrastructure which does possible use of software-defined data storage;

• SSD drives with the NVMe specification provide improved, in comparison with standards of SAS/SATA/FC, PCI Express performance;

• The Mellanox switch accelerates network functioning to 40  GB / with and improves communication between three hosts forming hyper convergent infrastructure;

• The server of industry standard x86 from E4 created on the Intel platform shows performance above, than the used SAN environment.