Hi folks, Ned here again. This week I introduced my new video series on Storage Replica in Windows Server 2016 TP2. First it was Stretch Cluster disaster recovery, then Test-SRTopology. Today you get to see replication over a real 25km fiber network using Chelsio iWARP RDMA.
Wait, you don’t believe that I have a 25km network? OK smarty-pants, here’s Greg holding it.
Our little Greglet, dwarfed by unshielded fiber spools… He wrote SMB Direct, BTW. Not a dope.
The demo video today shows a pair of white box servers running a single NVME drive apiece, with a fiber optic network that takes a 50km round trip for every Storage Replica packet, all plugged into RDMA. I demonstrate the “before and after” of configuring replication, while hitting disks with a reasonable simulated workload using diskspd. Storage Replica uses SMB 3.1.1 and that means you get RDMA support – along with encryption, signing, and multi-channel – all for free.
Let’s rot our brains with TV!
So nasal…
We also have a 40km (!!!) network plugged into our Mellanox InfiniBand MetroX test setup. With this amazingly low latency RDMA rig - usually a few hundred microseconds at 80km roundtrip - you have to have incredible storage to even tax the network – and we just took delivery of some last week. I’ll share the crazy results at a later date.
Tune in tomorrow for server–to-server replication provisioning.
Until next time,
- Ned “Greg may be a stand-in for Paul Rudd that new Ant Man movie” Pyle