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Mellanox Enables Highly Efficient Virtual Desktop Infrastructure using VMware's Virtual SAN Storage Solution and Micron SSDs
[August 25, 2014]

Mellanox Enables Highly Efficient Virtual Desktop Infrastructure using VMware's Virtual SAN Storage Solution and Micron SSDs


SAN FRANCISCO --(Business Wire)--

Mellanox (News - Alert)® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ:MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced a collaborative solution using VMware Virtual SAN™, a hyper-converged storage product, Mellanox's 10GbE interconnect and Micron's (NASDAQ:MU) solid-state drives (SSDs) that enables a highly efficient Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment.

The solution consists of 3 servers running VMware vSphere® and VMware Virtual SAN™, each with one Mellanox ConnectX®-3 10GbE NIC (News - Alert), two Micron 1.4TB P420m PCIe solid-state drives and six hard disk drives (HDDs). Combined, the three servers support 360 Virtual Desktops with less than 5 minutes boot time, significantly reducing the total cost per user.

VMware's Virtual SAN aggregates locally-attached disks in a vSphere cluster to create a storage solution that can rapidly be provisioned from VMware's vCenter™. This simple model saves both time and money while delivering high-performance with SSD caching.

"We are happy to see the growing adoption of VMware Virtual SAN," said Alberto Farronato, director, product marketing at VMware. "We are pleased that Mellanox and Micron have recognized the advantages that Virtual SAN enables and have integrated it into their joint VDI solution."

Mellanox's scale-out 10/40/56GbE products enable users to benefit from a far more scalable, lower latency, and virtualized fabric with lower overall fabric costs and power consumption. These benefits yield greater efficiencies, and simplifies and streamlines storage management compared to traditional Ethernet fabrics.

"As the number of worldwide mobile internet users continues to grow exponentially, IT managers are looking to deploy more efficient VDI systems to support the growth," said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "The joint solution enables a scalable infrastructure that minimizes the cost per virtual desktop user."

Micron's P420m PCIe SSDs combine leading performance, power efficiency, and a low total cost of ownership to accelerate I/O in enterprise servers, hot data cache systems, and online transaction processing applications. It is a logical choice for Virtual SAN implementations, which all require some element of flash storage.

"VSAN is a key enabler of flash as performance needs are moving more mainstream across virtualized applications," said Kevin Dibelius, director of enterprise storage marketing at Micron. "Pairing our high-performance storage with Mellanox's high-bandwidth switches helps customers maximize system throughput and cost-efficiency, dramatically improving application performance."



Demonstrations and presentations at VMworld® 2014 (August 24th- August 28th)

Visit Mellanox Technologies at booth #2023 or Micron at booth #929 to learn about the benefits of using this flash-based storage solution. More information on Mellanox's activities during VMworld 2014 is available at http://www.mellanox.com/vmworld14.


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About Mellanox

Mellanox Technologies is a leading supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage. Mellanox interconnect solutions increase data center efficiency by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency, delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance capability. Mellanox offers a choice of fast interconnect products: adapters, switches, software, cables and silicon that accelerate application runtime and maximize business results for a wide range of markets including high performance computing, enterprise data centers, Web 2.0, cloud, storage and financial services. More information is available at www.mellanox.com.

Mellanox and ConnectX are registered trademarks of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

VMware and Virtual SAN are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.


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