StarWind Software

Hi!

I understand that you guys discontinued the initiator. I suppose in favour of MS built-in initiator?

Well, I'm a home user and I'm considering iSCSI to centralise storage. However, I have grown accustomed to SSD disks and would like to have SSD-like performance even on remote drives.
I have been testing iSCSI for a while now and while performance is far from abysmal, it is still orders of magnitude slower than SSD.

Question: You already support caching for server side. Would you be willing to consider continuing initiator development in order to build-in the cache logic?It is always preferable to have both ends from the same provider and your VirtualSAN is looking really fine so far.

Thanks.

Yes, Microsoft didn't want to WHQL our monolithic SCSI port iSCSI initiator and we didn't want to re-write it as a StorPort miniport. We didn't drop the code completely however, we ported it to user mode and it does iSCSI & iSER for StarWind synchronization traffic in between the nodes, which is way more efficient and error-free comparing to using Microsoft iSCSI initiator, something we did before. We have to rely on Microsoft iSCSI initiator for uplink connectivity still and you're 100% right here, but it has it's own issues and we ended up with two special drivers to workaround its problematic behavior: TCP loopback accelerator (we don't distribute it outside of our own products) bypasses most of TCP stack for simplicity and performance if we connect iSCSI in a loopback and iSCSI accelerator (this one is available for download and it's our free product) which helps to distribute every new TCP/iSCSI session on the new CPU core, while stone-age written Microsoft code just picks up random core for that leading to some cores being 100% used and other ones doing nothing, whole thing affects performance obviously.

Bad news: we're revenue driven company and don't see much of the profit in a low-margin SOHO space. Good news: for NVMe redirection you can use NVMe-oF Target (we have one for Windows as part of StarWind VSAN) and NVMe-oF Initiator (one we have as well as a free product) to solve your needs. For now you'll need RDMA capable Mellanox NICs, but we're working on NVMe-over-TCP as well.

Hope this helped