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Unified Storage (Multiprotocol)
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IntroductionThe legend says people had only one language before building the Tower of
Babel, but
then God interfered and they suddenly stopped understanding each other. This is fantasy of
course,
though in any case now people speak different languages and need some translating intermediate
to
communicate freely. Software works in the same way, to some extent, “speaking different
languages”,
called protocols. Dozens of solutions have been developed to the point of “industry-standard”,
dividing
the market.
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Some vendors agreed on mutual compatibility, but most of them decided to keep some
“exclusiveness” at the cost of user convenience. Thus, it is considered normal to have different
incompatible products as part of IT infrastructure inside a single company, using some special
addition
to make them work together.
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Problem
Every piece of software has a limited set of supported communication protocols. Even if an application
supports multiple protocols, it “prefers” one of them to others in the list, typically having performance
issues with using the least preferred. Getting a few different applications to work together may prove a
real challenge. When it comes to virtualization, this happens a lot with storage and consumers.
Products from different vendors support incompatible protocols
They use different, often mutually incompatible uplink protocols. For example, Microsoft Hyper-V “prefers”
SMB3, also working with iSCSI with certain issues and not working with NFS at all, while VMware vSphere
works with NFS and iSCSI, but not SMB3, so finding a storage for both environments simultaneously can be
tricky. Some software, like VMware Virtual SAN, has its own proprietary protocol, making it even more of a
challenge to achieve compatibility. Specialized solutions that allow multiprotocol communication, such as
additional “gateway” layers, require skills and money, also being a bottleneck in performance, because all
the data has to go through them.
Solution
StarWind Virtual SAN exposes industry-standard uplink protocols. It uses SMB3 with all fuzzy dialect
features, including RDMA-supporting SMB Direct and MPIO-utilizing SMB Multichannel. NFSv4.1and iSCSI (VVOLs
on iSCSI, NVMe over Fabrics and iSER. Basically, it can stick any consumers, such as
virtualization environments, together with the storage into a working setup. The typical usage scenarios are
virtually unlimited: bare-metal, converged (“compute and storage separated”), hyperconverged, Clustered Shared Volumes for SOFS, VVOLs on top of iSCSI, SMB3 file server and many others. StarWind Virtual SAN can
expose industry-standard protocols outside and feed the storage to any other deployment based on Hyper-V, vSphere, Xen, etc.
StarWind Virtual SAN support all industry-standard protocols
Conclusion
StarWind Virtual SAN becomes the universal “gateway” for all industry-standard uplink protocols: iSCSI, NFS,
SMB3, etc. In a way, it works like polyglot who doesn’t need any third party to communicate with people in
many different languages. It allows multiple virtualization environments to interact with storage and form a
working setup, providing virtually unlimited deployment scenarios.
