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OSSLab uses VirtuCache to improve storage performance of ZFS

OSSLab uses VirtuCache to improve storage performance of ZFS

Use Case:
Storage Performance

Location:
Taipei City, Taiwan

Challenges:

  • In the field of Data Recovery and Rescue, the services company needs to quickly get familiar with their customer’s networking, storage, and server hardware and migrate large amounts of data from one location to another. The faster the migration is accomplished the higher the profit margins.
  • One challenge is that any technology used to speed up migration of such data needs to seamlessly work with any server, storage and networking hardware.
  • A second challenge is that the customer server, storage, and networking hardware cannot be changed or upgraded.
  • A third challenge is that any new technology deployed at the customer site needs to be rolled back once the data recovery project is complete, and needless to say, without any negative impact to the customer’s environment.

Benefits:

  • Since VirtuCache is kernel only software, it can be rapidly installed (and uninstalled), and since it can cache to host RAM, no new hardware is required to be installed. VirtuCache is also hardware agnostic. So long as the storage is connected to ESXi hosts using block based storage protocols, VirtuCache will work well. For all these reasons, VirtuCache is a good tool for service providers in the Data Rescue and Recovery business.
  • By caching to host RAM, VirtuCache ensured that data could be migrated between VMs at a throughput of 400MBps regardless of server, storage, and networking technologies involved

OSSLab uses VirtuCache to improve storage performance of ZFS

The Virtunet Difference
In the Data Rescue and Recovery business, server side caching like VirtuCache speeds up moving data between locations, regardless of server and storage technologies involved. VirtuCache is the only server side software available for VMware and hence it was the automatic choice for OSSlab.

Taipei City, Taiwan. January 26, 2024.

OSSlab, based in Taiwan provides services in the field of Data Rescue and Recovery. This field requires moving data from one server location to another on a large scale. It is hugely benefited by server side caching software since by caching hot data to server side RAM or SSD, it speeds up such migration of data.

OSSlab installed VirtuCache to improve the performance of various open source storage that was deployed on servers and connected to ESXi hosts over iSCSI.

OSSlab VMware and Storage Environment.

Virtunet Systems develops VirtuCache software. VirtuCache improves the storage performance of VMware VMs by caching all VM read and write operations to in-host SSD or RAM.

ZFS was originally developed by Sun Microsystems back in 2001 and it had some of the most advanced storage features of the time like unified volume manager and file system, adaptive caching to memory, snapshots , and replication (as you can tell we are big fans). The Open Source version of ZFS called OpenZFS still remains one of the more popular open source storage.

VirtuCache was installed on ESXi 7 running on Dell servers with between 16 and 98 GB host RAM assigned to VirtuCache.

ZFS was deployed on IBM servers and connected to ESXi hosts over iSCSI.

For extensive details on OSSlab’s environment and the testing their engineers did with VirtuCache, please review the blog post on OSSlab’s website.

OSSlab office, Taipei City, Taiwan
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