Software Based Storage

StarWind iSCSI SAN V6 Released

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Although it has been available for about a month, the next major release of the StarWind iSCSI target is here! Some of the biggest features include (taken from here): High availability: – 3-node HA configuration. Synchronous mirroring between 3 nodes of an HA storage cluster. Such storage architecture ensures higher uptime and higher performance compared to a 2-node HA configuration. – HA device nodes manager. You can add, remove, or switch nodes of HA cluster … Read more…

Software Based Storage: Thoughts and local storage tests

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It has occurred to me that all these comparisons are not exactly equal…while the VM configurations, test procedures, and testing hardware are all identical – there are certainly ways to improve performance…some methods could be applied to all comparisons (adding a storage controller card with battery-backed write cache, and several 15K SAS spindles), and some are specific to the software presenting the storage (using an SSD to house the ZIL and\or l2ARC – only applies … Read more…

FreeNAS Performance Part 1: NFS Storage

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EDIT 1/8/2013: This post should be titled FreeNAS: The performance you will get when you don’t allocate enough RAM, or enough disk resources. These results are not a true representation of what FreeNAS can do. Here’s a better example: FreeNAS Performance Part 2 Following the Microsoft iSCSI VS. StarWind iSCSI, I would like to also compare another option that offers FreeBSD based network storage – FreeNAS. It supports AFP, CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and has a … Read more…

Software iSCSI Targets: Part 2B – StarWind, Multiple VMs

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Part 2B: 3 VM IOMeter load on a StarWind iSCSI datastore. Same procedure as previous testing – Complete install time: 32 minutes, 39 seconds – 3.5 minutes faster than the Microsoft iSCSI target software. Here’s the setup: Here’s the CPU\RAM of the iSCSI server during OS install: Just as previously, RAM is allocated to cache and CPU is heavily utilized. Here is the network utilization during OS install: The utilization graph looks strikingly similar to … Read more…

Software iSCSI Targets – Part 2a: MS iSCSI – Multiple VMs

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In Part 2 of this series, we will look at the performance of the Software iSCSI targets under a heavier load – more specifically, 3 server VMs. While this may not seem like very much load, keep in mind that the backend storage is still just a single 7200RPM spindle, and all networking is over a single 1GbE link. All of the hardware from test 1 is the same, but here are the specs for … Read more…

StarWind iSCSI vs. Microsoft iSCSI – Part 1

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*NEW* StarWind V8 [BETA] is here!! and it looks VERY promising!! For some small to medium sized businesses and even some home power users, shared storage is a must-have. Unfortunately, standard high performance SANs carry with them a hefty price tag and a massive administrative overhead – so an EMC or NetApp filer is often out of the question. What is the answer? Turn an everyday server into an iSCSI storage server using iSCSI software target … Read more…