Back in March of 2017 we ran our annual MVPDays Community Roadshow and at the show my friend and fellow MVP Philip Elder @MPECSInc presented a session on Hyper-V Performance Bottlenecks. And out of this session he gave a wonderful talk on how he uses Mellanox Technologies and RoCE for all of his Storage Spaces Direct builds.

Now interestingly enough the parts to build your very own Storage Spaces Direct core network can be very cost effective.

I checked online and the MSX1012X-2BRS 12 Port QSFP+ model runs for around 2994 USD Street price. That isn’t bad when you consider you can get a pair of these for redundancy for around 6000 USD.

This is absolutely perfect for the Starter Storage Spaces Direct configuration.

Check the article below out for more details on the swtich itself.

http://www.mellanox.com/related-docs/prod_eth_switches/PB_SX1012X.pdf


Pair this up with the Mellanox MCX312A-XCBT RDMA RoCE Network Adapter and you can really build an amazing solution for your core Storage Spaces Direct Network for under 10K USD. This means that you could easily power a 4-Node S2D Cluster including a pair of redundant Switches for that price point. Now that is amazing.

http://www.mellanox.com/oem/lenovo/rel_docs/RG_Lenovo.pdf



Now have a nice listen to this little video created by Philip and the folks over at Mellanox Technologies.

Thanks and Happy Learning,

Dave