Qlogic announced today the Mt. Rainier project, the server-side caching
solution leveraging internal server SSD and PCI-e flash memory.
There are three possible Mt. Rainer cards configurations:
- An adapter with a separate flash card and PCIe link using an x4 cable drawing 25W
- An Adapter with a SAS IO port daughter card which links to internal server SSD
- An Adapter with an SSD daughter card with all power coming from the PCIe slot - 50W
From the OS point of view, the Mt. Rainer adapter is installed as a
single adapter which needs only one driver, no additional drivers for PCIe
cards or SSD devices will be required.
Another interesting feature is the Shared Caching feature which makes the shared
cache available across multiple servers, all transparent to the host. The Qlogic storage router technology is used
for this feature. Each Mt. Rainier adapter can see what the other cards in the
SAN zone are doing and know which LUNs have been cached. The SAN protocols are
used to synchronize this information.
For the high availability purposes the Cache Mirroring feature can be
used. The Cache Mirroring provides the synchronous peer-to-peer mirroring with
write-back and write-through modes support.
One of the most important things is that cache memory management, Cache Mirroring and Shared Caching
don’t require host CPU resources – all operations are performed on the adapter’s
ASIC level.
The first Mount Rainier products should be available in the first half of
2013.
