Improve DRBD Performance with PCI Express

Dolphin Express accelerates DRBD

Dolphin's PCI Express solution delivers significant improvements in DRBD transaction throughput and latency and provides the best possible combination of performance, scalability and application security through replication.

DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) is a distributed high availability storage system for Linux. Writes to local disk are synchronously and transparently written to a disk on another system through a fast and reliable network. DRBD is often used with MySQL but is not limited to this environment. It can be used with any application or system that need a synchronous replicated block device.

Performance results

An interconnect is required to connect to the replication node in a DRBD solution. Ethernet is often implemented as the interconnect solution. PCI Express offers a faster solution to write to the replicating node.

Figure a illustrates PCI Express performance compared to QDR Infiniband and 10 Gbit Ethernet on a LINBIT random write performance benchmark. When storage bottlenecks are addressed by implementing high performance storage systems such as SSD storage, the interconnect performance plays a major role in application performance. As can be seen in the write performance benchmark, there is a significant performance improvement when moving from Infiniband and 10 Gbit Ethernet to PCI Express. This is a result of the additional bandwidth and latency improvement of PCI Express.

The low latency/high bandwidth communication model using Dolphin Express PCI Express solution and SuperSockets software provides an ideal environment for supporting an extremely efficient replicated block storage mechanism. As a result, it shows up to 60% improvement in performance over a 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Infiniband solutions. Overall, Dolphin Express along with high performance storage provides the best replication performance for DRBD.

Dolphin partners with LINBIT

LINBIT is the leading provider of DRBD technology and solution. Please visit LINBIT web for more information about how to most easily migrate to a reliable DRBD storage solution.

More information about DRBD can be found on http://www.drbd.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRBD

Dolphin Express DRBD Product Kit

Dolphin offers a complete PCI Express based solution for DRBD. This product kit includes two Dolphin Express host adapter cards and a PCI Express cables, along with Dolphin SuperSockets software and documentation. LINBIT offers a discount on support for Dolphin kit purchasers seeking installation and performance optimization support.