First look at Infinio Accelerator with SuperServer cluster shared Synology iSCSI datastore
I recently saw Scott Davis, CTO of Infio, speaking at the Virtualization Group - Boston. It was held right at VMware's location in Cambridge, MA, right near Boston. It's the same place Scott used to work actually. He did an amazing job bringing the audience through a brief history of computer storage technology, then gave us a glimpse at what Infinio does for the enterprise, seen right here:
VirtG Boston September 2015 - Infinio - Disruptive Innovations in Enterprise Storage from Peter Larson on Vimeo.
It got me thinking.
Infinio Accelerator works with NFS and block storage like iSCSI or a SAN, not with my local SATA datastore in my home lab.
Both file (NFS) and block (Fibre Channel and iSCSI) storage protocols are supported.
I had just recently received a basic Synology NAS with 2 3TB drives. Modest performance, given the 2 spinny drives in the default mirrored config:
What if I blew away this NAS's CIFS/SMB shares. Scratch that, how about blowing everything away? Rebuild with pure RAID0 (striped) for speed. I decided to go all in, and make it just one big iSCSI VMFS datastore of the "Block-Level - Single LUN on RAID" type, for the best performance this little affordable NAS could possibly deliver. This way, I could get a feel for iSCSI on ESXi 6.0, and get a look at Infinio.
My thinking was to configure my Supermicro 5028D-TN4T SuperServer, and the 2 temporary identical loaners, to see that shared iSCSI datastore. Finally, if I had everything installed, I'd be ready to test the speed of Infinio Accelerator, and see how it impacted the overall vSphere performance. Pinched myself, then went and did it.
So much for what ifs. I had the gear, so what the heck, let's tinker! Yep, that's right, in late September, I briefly had a chance to use 3 identical SuperServers in a vSphere 6.0 cluster. Lucky me! I only had about 2 hours before I had to return the loaners to get this basic testing completed. You'll sense that urgency as the video wraps up. Made it to UPS 2 minutes before closing time, no problem!
I got a good feel for the Infinio Accelerator install, UI, and performance. This is not a benchmark, and not a head-to-head comparison with vFlash Read Cache. It's just a video of me giving Infinio a try in my home lab, learning a bit about how it works along the way. Yeah, it went pretty well, giving me a sense of what it could do for an enterprise SAN.
Just because I did this in a home lab doesn't mean it's intended for licensing in a home lab, or even practical or affordable in such a scenario. It's meant for the enterprise. I like learning enterprise stuff this way.
Lab testing always recommended to get the feel for any such product. Glad I had a chance to get a hands-on trial, taking what I learned from Scott, and seeing it in action, on real gear, not some nested virtualization simulation.
I learn by doing, and hopefully you'll pick up a thing or two watching the video of my tinkering. But I would encourage you to also give it a try, with all the trial links right below. Let us know what you think by dropping a comment here at TinkerTry, right below this article, no login required!
This test was performed with a cluster of 3 Supermicro SuperServer 5028D-TN4T systems that have incredible storage capabilities in a compact and efficient design. These are the benefits of Intel's System on a Chip design. Soon, I'll have a cluster of 2 of these SuperServers servers running with a 10GbE link between them!
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Infinio, and have no discount codes or affiliate links. This is just me checking out an interesting bit of software engineering!
See also at TinkerTry
See also
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Infinio Accelerator provides software-based storage acceleration that boosts performance by 10X cost effectively and non-disruptively. While hardware solutions can be expensive and complex, Infinio creates a shared, deduplicated cache from small amounts of RAM in your hosts to increase storage performance. You’ll make no changes to VMware operations or your storage configuration, continuing to rely on shared storage arrays for capacity. With Infinio, improve application performance, keep your existing storage for longer, and refresh your arrays at a significantly lower cost.
STORAGE ACCELERATION
HOW IT WORKS
ARCHITECTURE FOR PERFORMANCE- See more at: http://www.infinio.com/product#sthash.GkQ68BcH.dpuf
- Free Trial
- Product Demo
Sharing
Scott @shd_9 I enjoyed your #VirtG talk/tested @Infinio Accelerator on @Supermicro_SMCI SuperServers with @Synology! pic.twitter.com/Ak6WWVHPdW
— Paul Braren (@paulbraren) October 23, 2015@shd_9 @Infinio @Supermicro_SMCI @Synology The full story with video is now available at https://t.co/Rxm6wZSYaO pic.twitter.com/YfjHZFjecW
— Paul Braren (@paulbraren) October 23, 2015
