Supercomputing: Excelero NVMesh 2 Software Support for BlueField Dual-Port 100Gb/s and SmartNIC Adapters From Mellanox

At the SC18 conference Excelero, Inc. announced that its NVMesh 2 software will support the BlueField dual-port 100Gb/s system-on-a-chip (SoC) and smart network interface card (SmartNIC) adapters from Mellanox Technologies Ltd.

BlueField’s NVMe over Fabrics IO/s and low latency will add to the already performance and cost-advantage that NVMesh software delivers for most demanding applications, including HPC. Because computers using NVMesh on BlueField offload IO processing to the BlueField SmartNIC, they free CPU resources for other much needed processing tasks, achieving greater cost-efficiency.

In addition, since NVMesh software drivers reside on the BlueField SmartNIC, IT teams running NVMesh on BlueField platforms avoid the need to install client-side drivers – and get an OS-agnostic storage solution that runs automatically on any OS supporting NVMe, such as Windows, proprietary and non-standard Linux distributions, MacOS, VMware and other enterprise platforms.

As the HPC community embraces NVMe flash storage, the NVMesh/BlueField combination offers an approach that delivers the near-instant response times of local NVMe that users crave, while benefiting from the efficiencies of centralised storage. The elimination of software driver complexity and OS platform support give HPC environments the same flexibility that IT leaders demand for web-scale applications.

The BlueField dual port 100Gb/s SoC solutions combine Mellanox’s ConnectX-5 network acceleration technology with an array of performance 64-bit ARM A72 processor cores and a PCIe Gen3 and Gen4 switch.

The BlueField SmartNIC adapters have demonstrated 7.5 million IO/s, with zero CPU utilisation and under three microseconds of NVMe-oF latency – performance that is the fit for NVMesh’s design for enabling shared NVMe flash at local performance.

“Mellanox’s BlueField family of SmartNICs, storage controllers and systems-on-a-chip provide smart and scalable NVMe accelerations that are a great fit for HPC applications requiring superior efficiency and low TCO,” said Gilad Shainer, VP, marketing, Mellanox. “Leveraging the advantages of BlueField, Excelero is poised to extend the value of software-defined block storage platforms, accelerating the next generations of HPC.“

“Every IT manager needs smart ways to do more with the same resources, and BlueField along with NVMesh is an outstanding way to accomplish this for demanding web-scale applications,” said Yaniv Romem, CTO, Excelero. “We are delighted to be the first NVMe software-defined storage provider to support the Mellanox BlueField platform, and to continue our support for Mellanox’s 100Gb/s solutions.“

The company is presently testing BlueField SmartNIC configurations, with BlueField support planned in spring 2019 in the just-announced NVMesh 2.

Read also:
Excelero Launches NVMesh 2 Software-Only Storage Solution
Adds support for TCP/IP and FC, flexible data protection, performance analytics, eliminates network latency for scale-out infrastructures, delivers “90% storage efficiency”, lowers barriers to shared NVMe flash.
2018.11.08 | Press Release