AC Series Storage System Performance

Starboard’s hybrid storage virtualizes and shares solid state drives to automatically deliver performance to your applications based on real time usage needs. As a result your applications run faster and your storage is more efficiently utilized.

Starboard internal benchmarks for Microsoft Exchange show that a Starboard Storage AC-Series System supported 20,000 mailboxes using just 12 3TB 7200 RPM NL-SAS disk drives. That is as few as 1/10th of the disk drives required by other competitive solutions supporting the same number of mailboxes. As well as delivering tremendous performance this also offers tremendous savings in rack space and energy costs.

 

 

What enables this type of performance? The AC Series provides a second-generation, autonomic tiering architecture called the SSD Accelerator Tier™ that both lowers operational overhead and provides predictable performance when and where it’s needed. Rather than relying on complex upfront workload analysis and policy settings that make first-generation tiering architectures unresponsive to changing workloads, the SSD Accelerator Tier provides intelligent I/O stream detection to boost performance for both reads and writes on demand for consolidated storage. When applications need performance and are being accessed frequently they are automatically promoted to the SSD Accelerator Tier and performance increases. When that performance profile is no longer needed the SSD resources are released and made available to other applications.

The Starboard Storage AC Series combines this state-of-the-art technology with flexible configurations that meet the requirements of multiple workload profiles. The above example uses a mix of 7200 RPM NL-SAS drives and SSDs  to achieve best-in-class price/performance, but the system can also support 15K SAS drives in combination with the SSD accelerator tier for demanding database workloads. Both hard disk drives and the SSD Accelerator Tier can be expanded to deliver more performance and more capacity for consolidated storage depending on the profile of your applications.

Bottom line: the Starboard Storage AC series allows you to consolidate storage confidently with accelerated performance available to all of your workloads on demand.

 

For more performance information read:

Storage System Design for Mixed Workloads, White Paper by the Evaluator Group
AC72 Lab Validation - White paper by the Evaluator Group

"With simple volume provisioning, we were able to consolidate all assets under the Starboard solution to improve storage utilization and management. As a result, we saw exceptional I/O performance, four times faster than the previous solution we were using. Even during volume production and peak load periods we were able to maintain high performance and throughput across our virtual environment."   - Shane Brown, CEO, DigeTekS