Increased density of virtual machines on a single system within a data center is driving more I/O connectivity per physical server. Multiple 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet NICs along with Fibre Channel HBAs are used in a single enterprise system for data exchange. Such hardware proliferation has increased I/O cost, convoluted cable management, and caused loss of I/O slots. 25GbE and higher networking solutions with higher speeds that can run multiple protocols simultaneously (RoCE, iSCSI, etc.) can deliver better performance with unmatched scalability and efficiency. This helps reduce costs while providing the ability to support an increasingly virtualized and agile data center.
The efficiency of today‘s data centers depends heavily on fast and efficient networking and storage capabilities. Microsoft has determined that offloading the network stack processing from the CPU to the network is the optimal solution for storage hungry workloads such as Microsoft SQL Server, and Machine learning. Offloading frees the CPU to do other application processing, which improves performance and reduces the number of servers required to support a given workload, resulting in both CapEx and OpEx savings.
Whether looking for on premise data center or public cloud offerings, Microsoft‘s solutions combined with Mellanox networking with offload accelerators provides for a solid foundation to provide outstanding performance, and increased efficiency to accommodate evolving business needs.
Mellanox high performance and low latency Ethernet and InfiniBand-based server adapters and switches provide fault-tolerant and unified connectivity between clustered database servers and native storage, allowing for very high efficiency of CPU and storage capacity usage. The result is 50% less hardware cost to achieve the same level of performance
