PMC-Sierra and Mellanox Demontrates NVMe Over RDMA and Peer-to-Peer

PMC-Sierra Inc. (PMC) and Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. showcased two NVM Express (NVMe) solutions at Flash Memory Summit 2015.

The companies announced a solution for peer-to-peer transactions between RDMA-capable NICs and NVRAM drives to accelerate critical data center applications by enabling direct memory transactions to persistent memory across a low-latency fabric. DDR bus utilization is becoming a bottleneck for many high-performance mission-critical solutions. The combination of Mellanox PeerDirect RDMA and PMC Flashtec NVRAM Drives enables peer-to-peer transactions directly between PCIe devices, freeing up the CPU and DDR bus. With Flashtec NVRAM Drives and RDMA capabilities, modern scale-out distributed applications can protect their critical data from power failures by writing directly to NVRAM across an RDMA-capable network interface without compromising performance and latency.

NV1600 Flashtec NVRAM Drive

PMC and Mellanox also announced they have demonstrated NVMe over RDMA leveraging the Flashtec NVRAM Drive’s NVMe interface and ConnectX-3 Pro network card. NVMe over RDMA enables faster application response times and improved scalability across virtual data centers by connecting remote subsystems with flash appliances, eliminating the increased latency caused by SCSI translation.

“With this latest enhancement to our PeerDirect software library, customers can now integrate NVRAM into their applications and use a low latency RDMA fabric to support a distributed Persistent Memory Model, while offloading the memory subsystem and CPU of the remote node,” said Michael Kagan, CTO, Mellanox. “Combining PMC’s NVMe and storage expertise with Mellanox’s high-speed networking and RDMA capabilities is leading to very significant advancements in how end users can benefit from NVMe.“

“Maximizing the efficiency of the CPU and DDR bus is a major concern for data center architects,” said Derek Diker, VP, performance solutions group, PMC. “PMC’s Flashtec products provide a direct link between the CPU and flash, and set the bar for storage performance. These solutions with Mellanox are yet another example of how NVMe can help data centers get the most out of their assets and drive down latency.“

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Mellanox Ethernet and IB interconnect solutions provide  high performance for solid state storage. ConnectX-3 Pro, ConnectX-4, and ConnectX-4 Lx IB and Ethernet adapters along with Spectrum switches and LinkX cables deliver an end-to-end solution supporting low-latency storage access and replication at 10, 25, 40, 50, 56, and 100Gb/s speeds.

Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx

Flashtec NVRAM drives combine the speed and endurance of DRAM with the persistency of NAND flash to deliver ten times higher performance than the fastest SSD, at more than 10 million I/Os, with sub-microsecond latency. Leveraging PCIe 3.0, the Flashtec NVRAM drives connect directly to the host to optimize CPU utilization and maximize overall system performance. They are based on the NVMe interface to enable plug-and-play PCIe connectivity.

The NVRAM Peer-Direct solution consists of any RDMA-compliant HCA from Mellanox and the Flashtec NVRAM drive. This is coupled with OS driver code (currently supported on Linux), as well as software from both Mellanox and PMC.