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 (hopefully you can see this, it seems our blog software is out to lunch today).
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