Case Study: Mellanox Technologies achieves record 27Gb/s throughput and 350K IOPS with StarWind Software

Accelerating iSCSI SAN Storage with Mellanox End-to-End Networking Solution

Mellanox Technologies, together with StarWind, tackled the need for faster, more cost- and power-efficient storage networking for virtualized environments. The challenge was to deliver high-speed iSCSI connectivity between servers and storage while minimizing latency, PCIe and cabling overhead—requirements common to IaaS/PaaS providers and modern data centers.

By running StarWind Virtual SAN on Mellanox Zorro cluster with ConnectX-2 40GbE NICs in HP DL380 servers, the solution achieved record results—up to 27 Gb/s throughput and 350K IOPS (25 Gb/s and ~300K IOPS in non‑HA tests with 16 clients). The deployment reduced PCIe slots, cables and power consumption, was plug‑and‑play with minimal install time, and proved more scalable and cost‑effective than multi‑10GbE trunking or traditional HBA approaches.

Mellanox Technologies