Pavilion Supercharges Windows Performance With NVMe-oF

Pavilion Data Systems, Inc. announced a technology enabling Windows customers to take advantage of NVMe-oF using NVMe-over-TCP or NVMe-over-RoCE drivers supported through the Microsoft WHQL program.

“Anyone considering the next update to their storage network should move to NVMe-oF. 100GbE fabrics are 3x as fast and half the cost of FC SANs, and 200GbE is starting to ship at high volumes,” said VR Satish, CTO. “NVMe/TCP and NVMe/RoCE are already shipping in all major Linux distributions and on VMware vSphere 7 Update 3. Microsoft WHQL certified NVMe-oF drivers for Windows users is the next logical step in data center storage networking. Pavilion is the only company that brings both of these capabilities to the Windows ecosystem today.“

The company’s NVMe/TCP initiator provides integration with existing Ethernet-based networks with a 50% lower latency than current iSCSI deployments. This means faster database transaction commits and database concurrency, enabling more users to do more work at a faster pace. No new NICs or switching infrastructure is required. iSCSI customers can deploy the firm’s HyperParallel Flash Array as an iSCSI device and transition to NVMe/TCP over time without data migration.

“NVMe-oF has tremendous potential,” said Eric Burgener, research VP, infrastructure systems, platforms, and technologies group, IDC. “VMware and the Linux community are shipping native NVMe/TCP and NVMe/RoCE drivers. With this announcement from Pavilion the vendor is opening up major new market opportunities with Windows users, allowing them to take advantage of very low-latency networking based on either RDMA or the ubiquitous TCP protocol.“

The company is also shipping a WHQL-certified NVMe/RoCE v2 initiator in conjunction with partner StarWind Software, Inc.. NVMe/RoCE allows for a client to directly access an application’s memory bypassing the CPU and avoiding complex network software stacks to improve application performance.

“We have numerous customers running with Windows drivers today across verticals including financial services, healthcare, government, as well as media and entertainment,” said Sundar Kanthadai, co-founder and chief development officer. “Pavilion has proven benchmarks with latencies less than 100μs for read and 25μs for writes, as shown in the HyperParallel Flash Array data sheet.“

Supporting Windows 10, Windows Server 2012 R2+, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server 2019, the firm‘s drivers for NVMe/TCP and NVMe/RoCE are available at the company’s website.