Mellanox 56Gb IB Accelerates Windows Server 2012 File Server

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that its RDMA technology for IB, supported in Windows Server 2012, demonstrates application performance and efficiency for file system, database and enterprise data centers.

Benchmark results performed by Mellanox, Microsoft Corp. and Fusion-io, Inc. delivered more than 5X faster application performance boost compared to 10GbE solutions.

The performance results were enabled by the new Microsoft SMB Direct protocol implemented in Windows Server 2012 Beta. SMB Direct takes advantage of Mellanox’s RDMA interconnect technology to provide for performance and reduced CPU overhead in enterprise data center applications. Mellanox’s RDMA-based interconnect technologies include the company’s FDR 56Gb/s IB and 40GbE with RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) interconnect products.

"A highlight of Windows Server 2012 is its great improvement in storage performance, as demonstrated by the preliminary benchmark results that SMB Direct has achieved," said Mike Schutz, senior director, Windows Server and Virtualization, at Microsoft. "With this new technology, customers can access storage over the network at the speed of local storage. As a result, a virtualized server infrastructure can utilize shared JBOD storage through the use of RDMA-enabled network interface cards (RNICs). This approach significantly increases data center efficiency."

"Data demand continues to exceed the capabilities of traditional spinning media, more and more businesses are seeking out ways to make their critical applications perform with the lowest-possible latency data throughput," said Tyler Smith, VP of Alliances, Fusion-io. "We are pleased to work with esteemed partners like Mellanox and Microsoft to bring end-to-end solutions into the marketplace that address the enterprise need for performance and efficiency while supporting the latest applications with ultra-low latency access to the data that supplies them."

"The increasing demand for business-critical information and rich content analytics within enterprises continues to shape data center application needs," said Gilad Shainer, VP for market development at Mellanox. "Using SMB Direct over Mellanox’s RDMA-enabled interconnect solutions provides a highly efficient data center infrastructure for storage file system, delivering the highest of performance at a lower cost."