News & Events

San Jose, CA and Eden Prairie, MN. March 22, 2015. Virtunet Systems is pleased to announce that Darwin Kauffman has decided to join Virtunet Systems' advisory board. Mr. Kauffman is advising Virtunet Systems on OEM strategy for Server, Storage, and SSD OEMs. Mr. Kauffman has held numerous leadership positions in Enterprise storage products. Most recently he was VP of SSD Product Management for Seagate Technology. Prior to that he was the VP and General Manager of WD Enterprise storage products including high cap and cold storage products. Previous to Western Digital he held numerous engineering and product management leadership roles at Seagate for 20 years. He is a graduate from LeTourneau University, Longview, TX, where he earned a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering Tech. Mr. Kauffman holds an MBA from Spears School of Business, Stillwater, OK, Oklahoma State University.

Typically Hadoop workloads are run on bare-metal servers. However since Stanford’s School of Medicine was 100% virtualized, and because their monitoring and management tools were integrated within VMware, it was easier for them to deploy Hadoop within VMs, instead of provisioning new physical servers.

The biggest challenge Stanford faced with Hadoop VMs was low throughput and high latencies for writes to disk.

VirtuCache was deployed on VMware hosts along with a 800 GB Intel S3500 SSD in each host. The 800GB S3500 costs $800 and does about 60MBps Write IOPS and 180MBps Read IOPS at under 10ms latencies from within VMs. With VirtuCache, all recent writes were written to this SSD and all frequently used data was read from this same SSD. The writes were then asynchronously synced with SAS based shared disks. As is standard configuration with VirtuCache, all writes to local SSD were replicated to two others SSDs in two different VMware hosts to prevent against data loss in case the local SSD or local host failed.

By ensuring that most of the storage IO happened to the local in-host SSD, we ensured consistently low latencies even for bursty write-intensive workloads from within Hadoop VMs.

VirtuCache is the ONLY solution in the market that can accelerate writes from local disk based storage with a kernel only deployment. A kernel only deployment ensures very low latencies compared with a VM based solution (as is the case with most of our competition).

As a result, deploying VirtuCache resulted in a 6-10X improvement in write latencies for Hadoop workloads from within VMs.

Jeff Weiss will be advising Virtunet Systems on identifying private capital resources and refining business strategy. Jeff was VP Engineering of Digital Light Circuits which researched photonic switching devices at Brown University, co-founder and CTO of Omnia Communications(acquired by Ciena), and served as VP of Systems Architecture for Ciena. Jeff received a B.S.E.E from Massachusets Institute of Technology , and an M.S.E.E from Columbia University.