Howard on Hybrid Cloud: DataON Announces New Integrated Systems for Azure Stack HCI Powered by 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors

In the past few weeks DataON announced its Integrated Systems for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI. DataON Integrated Systems combine Intel® technology and Azure Stack HCI to provide a powerful platform for data center modernization. These new solutions are comprised of DataON server nodes, which are powered by 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.

DataON AZS Integrated Systems with 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors provide a balanced architecture with built-in acceleration and advanced security capabilities, designed for the most in-demand workload requirements. Through partnership with the world’s software leaders and solution providers, they are optimized for trusted enterprise virtualization, remote or branch office and edge, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), high performance Microsoft SQL Server and delivering cloud app on-premises with Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) for Azure Stack HCI.

DataON has always been one of the leading partners for the latest Microsoft software-defined solutions with the latest Intel technologies. The combination of Azure Stack HCI with the new 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors brings together the best software and hardware capabilities to create an incredibly flexible, scalable, and high-performing infrastructure for customers.

Optimized for size & performance
with all-NVMe flash storage

DataON AZS-6212

Optimized for IOPS & capacity
with hybrid storage

DataON AZS-6224

Optimized for IOPS & performance
with all-NVMe flash storage

Highlights

Compute

  • Up to 42% more processors, 1.46x performance increase, 1.74x higher AI inference performance

Memory

  • 6x memory bandwidth improvement and more platform I/O with PCIe Gen 4
  • 33% more lanes with PCIe Gen 4
  • Up to 12TB memory per platform 32% higher memory bandwidth

Storage

  • Supports new next-generation Intel® Optane™ SSDs with 4x greater IOPS versus PCIe Gen 3
  • Supports new Intel® QLC NVMe SSDs with up to 1PB storage in 1U servers

Connectivity

  • Supports up to 200Gbps RDMA network speed for incredible HCI fabric
  • Secure everything, everywhere for data, apps, and platforms
  • Accelerate data protection with up to 1.48x encryption performance
  • Improve data confidentiality with secure enclaves with Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX)
  • Full memory encryption with Intel Total Memory Encryption
  • Advanced firmware protection with Intel Platform Firmware Resilience

Performance Testing

From our initial benchmark testing, the 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® platform delivers 30% more overall solution performance versus previous generation of platform, leveraging new PCIe Gen 4 technology.

Azure Stack HCI Benchmark: 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor platform versus 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor platform

DataON’s AZS-6112 with 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors outperformed customers 1,2,3 and 4 with 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors for all tests. The speed of the CPUs was not factored in.

  • Random workloads per core (IOPS / total number of cores)
  • Sequential workloads per drive (MB/s /total number of capacity drives)
Hardware Information (per Node) Additional Information
Processor: 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6346 CPU @ 3.10GHz16 Cores Storage Pool: 1
Memory: 512GB Virtual Disks: 4
RDMA: 2x NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 DX Dual Port QSFP56 100GbE Interleave Size: 256KB (default)
NVMe SSD: 12x Intel P5510 3.8TB Capacity/Volume: 5TB
NVMe SSD: None Total Usable Capacity: 20.10TB
SATA SSD: None Date of Benchmark: 07/04/2021
SAS HDD: None Operating System: Microsoft Azure Stack HCI
Number of VMs created: 32 CSV Cache Disabled

Random 4k, 8 Threads, 8 Outstanding I/O, 100% Read

Random 4k, 4 Threads, 8 Outstanding I/O, 100% Write

Random 4k, 4 Threads, 8 Outstanding I/O, 70% Read / 30% Write

Random 4k, 4 Threads, 8 Outstanding I/O, 50% Read / 50% Write

Sequential 512K, 1 Thread, 1 Outstanding I/O, 100% Read

Sequential 512K, 1 Thread, 1 Outstanding I/O, 100% Write