Mellanox ConnectX SmartNICs and BlueField I/O Processing Units 200Gb/s Adapters to Support NVMe-oF over TCP and RoCE

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced acceleration of NVMe/TCP at speeds up to 200Gb/s.

The portfolio of shipping ConnectX adapters supports NVMe-oF over both TCP and RoCE, and the ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 products also secure NVMe-oF connections over IPsec and TLS using hardware-accelerated encryption and decryption. These solutions empower cloud, telco and enterprise data centers to deploy NVMe flash storage platforms using both TCP/IP and RoCE.

The growing demands for web-scale, dynamic storage have led hyperscale cloud titans to adopt networked NVMe storage technologies to support their need for composable infrastructure with velocity and agility. Providing automated, on-demand and simple access to storage resources, composable storage architectures replace the traditional, siloed infrastructure model and benefit data centers of all sizes. Central to this approach is the provisioning of disaggregated, scale-out NVMe storage media that utilizes a high-throughput, low latency network interconnect for accelerating compute access to SDS.

The company offers a portfolio comprising ConnectX SmartNICs and BlueField IPUs. It delivers NVMe-oF capabilities over both TCP and RDMA transports, enabling performance, higher ROI, and lower TCO than other network adapters. The now-shipping ConnectX-6 Dx and upcoming BlueField-2 IPU support hardware cryptographic acceleration of IPSec and TLS for both RoCE and TCP, making them fast and secure NVMe-oF SmartNICs.

The NVMe/TCP storage acceleration enables customers to deploy NVMe storage today in existing TCP/IP network environments, allowing businesses to enjoy a transition path from legacy storage solutions to modern storage platforms.

Recent benchmarks demonstrate ConnectX adapters deliver up to full-line rate performance using the NVMe/TCP protocol. In addition, ConnectX and BlueField deliver NVMe-oF hardware accelerators for storage target and initiator functions over RoCE networks, providing performance and CPU efficiency. ConnectX SmartNICs and BlueField IPUs are for any NVMe-oF storage solution, allowing businesses to select their network of choice, achieve scale, eliminate any vendor lock-in, and secure data-in-motion as well as data-at-rest.

“As NVMe storage gains momentum in the industry, Mellanox Ethernet SmartNICs accelerate NVMe access across any network, demonstrating technology leadership in the space,” said Dror Goldenberg, SVP, software architecture, Mellanox. “Our NVMe/TCP and NVMe-oF RoCE acceleration technologies enable our customers to benefit from the economical and operational advantages of composable and disaggregated storage architecture, in a flexible and future-proof design.“

“We use Mellanox ConnectX NICs to deliver excellent performance from the Pavilion Hyperparallel flash Array, over either TCP or RoCE, or both simultaneously,” said VR Satish, CTO, Pavilion Data Systems, Inc. “We’ve shown that NVMe over TCP offers much better performance than iSCSI, and NVMe over Fabrics using RoCE delivers even faster performance, with average NVMe-oF latencies from 40-50% lower than using NVMe over TCP.“

“Excelero is proud to support RoCE and TCP networking with our NVMesh and NVMedge Software stacks,” said Yaniv Romem, CTO and co-founder, Excelero Ltd. “Our distributed NVMe flash solution supports amazingly fast and efficient storage performance on nearly any network fabric. But for the best possible NVMe-oF throughput and latency, we recommend Mellanox ConnectX adapters with Mellanox Spectrum switches.“

ConnectX SmartNICs have been adopted by and are available in the market through various compute and storage OEM vendors. They are supported by enterprise including OS providers and virtualization software stacks, including VMware ESXi, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. Compared to competing solutions, ConnectX provides improved power and an ASIC solution with a set of hardware accelerators and software-defined capabilities.

Connectx 6 Dx Cards
Click to enlarge

Resources:
ConnectX SmartNICs
BlueField IPUs
Mellanox Storage Solutions

Read also:
VMworld: Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 Cloud SmartNICs and I/O Processing Unit Solutions
Provide 200Gb/s Ethernet and IB connectivity, enabling next gen of clouds, secure datacenters and storage platforms.
September 2, 2019 | Press Release