Solution Brief

©2014 Mellanox Technologies. All rights reserved.

Figure 1 Hyper-converged Architecture of UnitedStack Private Cloud

With the continuous expansion of data centers and increasing deployment of service systems, more and more enterprises begin to deploy the cloud computing platform to build a private cloud based on the technical advantages of cloud computing, thereby coping with the challenges and pressure faced by traditional data centers, including cost pressure, service pressure and operation and maintenance pressure. At present, the private cloud has entered a substantive development stage. Cloud computing will develop rapidly in the following 3-5 years, which will therefore usher in a revolution of data centers.

However, the private cloud cannot be easily deployed or applied. A high-efficiency cloud computing system should yield a lot of benefits to enterprises, including improved resource usage, reduced total cost of owner-ship (TCO), improved IT efficiency, centralized and effective resource management, and enhanced service stability. In addition, the system needs to meet the requirements of flexible deployment, resilient expansion, and on-demand service. The architecture and technolo-gy adopted by the private cloud platform become the key factors to achieve these goals.

To meet the above requirements, Mellanox cooperated with UnitedStack to launch the high-efficiency Open-Stack private cloud solution. The following figure shows the functional architecture of the solution.

The features of the UnitedStack private cloud solution are as follows:

The private cloud builds on the OpenStack open-source platform and development standard and is completely compatible with native OpenStack application program-ming interfaces (APIs). The UnitedStack technical team actively participates in community development, and all source code will be submitted to the OpenStack open-source community, ensuring reliability of source code.

The UnitedStack private cloud enables the IT environ-ment of customers to be prospective and can adapt to the constantly changing service requirements at any time. Customers have flexible choices and do not need to rely on specific hardware, operating system, applica-tion or supplier, enhancing the confidence in deploying the present and future service systems in the private cloud.

High Efficiency OpenStack Private Cloud Solution

Opportunities and Challenges of Private Cloud High-Efficiency Private Cloud

• Implements the virtual data center (VDC) based onthe SDN to ensure service isolation and independence.

• Provides Ceph-based distributed high-performancestorage to greatly improve the IO performance of cloud VMs.

• Provides second-level performance monitoring forcloud VMs and supports the alarm function.

• Exerts access control on cloud VMs based on securitygroups and supports flexible security group policies.

• Employs powerful routers to provide the gateway,port forwarding and VPN services.

“As the leading cloud solution provider in China, UnitedStack is pleased to work together with Mellanox to build OpenStack-based cloud,” said Hui Cheng, CEO of UnitedStack. “The high performance interconnect as well as virtualization acceleration technologies from Mellanox help to driver our cloud into a flexible and innovative offering for our customers.”

page 2Solution Brief

Figure 2 Mellanox VMS-based network architecture of the private cloud

Elastic Network Interconnection

UnitedStack private cloud cluster comprises controller nodes, network nodes, and computing nodes, and is built on the 10G Ethernet. According to the network requirements and features, Mellanox proposes the aggregated network architecture based on the virtual modular switch (VMS). This architecture supports flexible configuration and dynamic expansion, and has cost advantages.

The network architecture supports three configuration modes: small scale (less than 160 nodes), medium scale (160-240 nodes), and large scale (more than 240 nodes). Different switch models are utilized so that customers can flexibly choose configuration modes based on the actual scale. The following figure shows the network topology of a large-scale cloud.

• Mellanox SX1024 functions as the Leaf switch. It provides forty-eight 10Gbps downlink ports, twelve 40Gbps uplink ports (non-blocking) or four 40Gbps uplink ports.

• Mellanox SX1710 functions as the Spine switch to aggre-gate network communication. It supports 40/56GbE network connection and provides up to 4.03 Tbps non-blocking band-width.

• The Multi-chassis Link Aggregation Group (MLAG) technol-ogy is applied to implement high availability of the two Spine switches.

• The interconnection between Spine switches and Leaf switches support 40Gbps, which can be upgraded to 56Gbps.

• Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro dual-port 10GE network adapter, which supports virtualization and cloud computing accelera-tion, is deployed at the computing, networking, and controller nodes in the private cloud cluster.

Virtualization Acceleration

Mellanox network adapter supports a wide range of virtualiza-tion and cloud computing features, including high-perfor-mance Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) through adapt-er built-in embedded switch (eSwitch), accelerated storage and virtual machine performance based on Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and hardware acceleration and offloading for overlay networks.

The Overlay Network (VXLAN/NVGRE/GENEVE) greatly improves the scalability, mobility and isolation of virtual domains by nesting the virtual network into the physical network.

Figure 3 Increased Network Bandwidth by VxLAN Offload

However, the Hypervisor-based Overlay Network will signifi-cantly increase the system overhead and cost. This is because packet processing, including encapsulation, decapsulation, fragmentation, aggregation, and checksum, will consume a lot of CPU resources, which will reduce the processing capacity of the system and thereby compromise the network throughput.

To break the performance bottleneck of the Overlay Network, Mellanox provides ConnectX-3 Pro and ConnectX-4 series network adapters, which has the hardware offload engine that can offload packet processing operations onto the network adapter to release CPU resources and greatly improve network throughput.

page 3Solution Brief

© Copyright 2014. Mellanox Technologies. All rights reserved.Mellanox, Mellanox logo, ConnectX, and SwitchX are registered trademarks of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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Figure 4 Performance Advantages of 40GbE-based Ceph Cluster

UnitedStack private cloud solution integrates the VxLAN offload function after testing based on Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro 10GbE network adapter. The figure below shows the performance advantages of VxLAN offload compared with VxLAN no offload.

Ceph Storage Acceleration

UnitedStack private cloud solution adopts the Ceph cluster as the OpenStack Cinder block storage. The storage cluster in a cloud computing environment needs to offer high availability and high scalability. Therefore, sufficient bandwidth and flexibility must be ensured in network interconnection to meet the application requirements.

The cluster network of Ceph is used for OSD interconnection, and the public network is used for user access. With the difference in data type and load, UnitedStack private cloud is adopting different network bandwidth for cluster network and public network. The public network is based on Mellanox 10GbE end-to-end network interconnection. The cluster network which has large data amount being transferred is based on Mellanox 40GbE, which is responsible for OSD heartbeat connection, data replication, load balancing, and data recovery.

The network design improves the performance of the Ceph storage cluster drastically. The figure below shows the advantages of this network design in terms of bandwidth and IOPS compared with 1G and 10G networks.

Solution Deployment and Benefits

UnitedStack private cloud solution based on Mellanox end-to-end Ethernet interconnection and virtualization acceleration has gained a huge success on the private cloud market in China and has been widely deployed to help customers improve the efficiency of the cloud platform. The solution has been widely recognized by customers.

The advantages of the private cloud solution are summarized as follows:• Open-source OpenStack: builds on the OpenStack open-source platform and standard APIs, supports timely update and online upgrade of OpenStack versions.

• Elastic network: The network topology builds on Mellanox VMS architecture, which supports flexible configuration and dynamic scalability and greatly reduces the hardware cost.

• High performance: Mellanox Ethernet core switch provides ultrahigh bandwidth of 40/56Gbps, achieves the Tb-level aggrega-tion and nanosecond-level latency.

• Virtualization acceleration: SR-IOV, Overlay network offload, and RDMA greatly improve resource utilization and accelerate performance of VMs and applications.

• Ceph cluster: The 40GbE-based Ceph cluster provides higher bandwidth and IOPS for cloud VMs.

• Linear expansion: Linear cluster expansion is supported to meet service upgrade and expansion requirements.

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