StarWind Virtual SAN is a software-defined storage solution that enables virtual machine-centric storage by mirroring internal hard disk and flash memory across hypervisor hosts, eliminating the need for physical shared storage. It supports both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, offering minimal hardware requirements with enhanced performance through technologies like log-structured file systems and in-line deduplication. The solution also provides fault tolerance, high availability, and flexible scaling capabilities, making it suitable for a variety of workloads including performance-intensive applications.

1. StarWind Virtual SAN

2. StarWind Virtual SAN is…
• an entirely software-based, VM-centric virtual machine storage, which
basically “mirrors” internal hard disk and flash memory between
hypervisor hosts
• software which eliminates any need for physical shared storage like SAS
JBODs, iSCSI, Fibre Channel or NAS and seamlessly integrates into the
hypervisor
2
before after

3. Similar to VMware Virtual SAN but…
• Has an absolutely minimalistic hardware footprint – needing only
two physical hosts running VMware vSphere hypervisor and literally no
other hardware (flash is optional)
3
• Flash-friendly – it uses Log-Structured File System (LSFS), in-line
Deduplication and RAM-based L1 cache to help flash last longer
eliminating small writes, reducing amount of written data and
adsorbing writes in RAM

4. Similar to Microsoft Clustered Storage Spaces
but…
4
• Has flexed-out hardware requirements starting with just two
physical hosts running Hyper-V, no additional and external hardware is
required: no SAS JBODs, SAS HBAs cabling, FC, iSCSI or SMB 3.0.
Works not only with SAS but with SATA and PCIe flash memory.
10/40/56 Gb Ethernet is used for connections, instead of 6/12 Gb SAS.
• Adds In-line Deduplication and LSFS log structure targeting VDI
and write intensive VMs and is Flash-friendly due to the amount of
written data reduced in real time thus prolonging flash life

5. Similar to Microsoft Clustered Storage Spaces
but…
• Runs inside Hyper-V kernel and uses SMB 3.0 SOFS, iSCSI and Scale-
5
Out File Servers approaches to fit storage.
It also uses RAM and PCIe based write back cache to adsorb
writes and cache I/O.

6. Hyper-Converged
6
• Natural part of the hypervisor, either kernel or VM based
• High performance with all major virtualization platforms, like Microsoft
Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, due to reducing I/O path, reads and
writes go locally and server side running RAM and flash cache.
• Support of non-virtualized clusters typically deployed for performance-intensive
SQL Server, Exchange, Oracle and SAP installations and
Scale-Out File Servers, SMB 3.0, NFS general purpose file servers

7. Compute and Storage Separated
7
• Possibility to run on a dedicated set of servers creating separated
storage pools, while for some installation a high LUN density is required.
Implemented for total flexibility of different configurations to increase
compute and storage layers performance with not only one means.
• Uses industry standard uplink protocols SMB 3.0, NFS, iSCSI and
hypervisor specific I/O acceleration technologies VAAI and ODX.

8. Scale-Up & Scale-Out
8
Flexible adoption of both Scale-Up and Scale-Out architectures
• capacity is increased by throwing more spindles or flash modules
into the existing storage cluster
nodes,
• storage and compute
capacity is increased by adding
additional nodes.

9. 9
• Fault Tolerance and High Availability
Basically “mirroring” of the actual storage and caches between the hosts.
Any number of replicas of a particular VM or LUN are kept alive and the
cluster uses required number of active storage controllers.
• VM-Centric Storage
A combination of RAM and Flash as multi-layered cache is used to eliminate
random reads, thus achieving major performance increase. Multiple smaller
random writes are coalesced into a single sequential big I/O write.
Implementation of Log-Structured File system (LSFS) allows to achieve up
to 90% raw sequential write performance at the file system level.

10. 10
• Hardware Agnostic
The utilization of inexpensive commodity hardware with the help of
proprietary in-house developed software, general-purpose x64 servers,
MLC flash, spinning disks and Ethernet, thus making a high-performance
solution affordable.
• Asynchronous replication
An effective mechanism to ensure that mission-critical business data is
replicated to a disaster recovery site. Replication is implemented to be
asynchronous, background, deduplication and compression-aware as
well as snapshot-based to reduce load on slow WAN connection.

11. 11
• Snapshots and Automated Storage Tiering
Implementing of inter-node tiering technology to offload “cold” data
from fast and expensive primary all-flash storage to slower but
inexpensive secondary storage tier.
• Deduplication and compression
Utilization of VM and flash-friendly space reduction technologies such
as in-line deduplication and compression, increasing usable capacity of
all-flash configurations and also prolonging flash life-cycle.

12. 301 Edgewater Place,
Suite 100,
Wakefield, MA 01880
USA
1-617-449-7717 Main
1-617-507-5845 Fax
www.starwindsoftware.com
sales@starwindsoftware.com