VMworld: Cavium Demos NVMe Scale-out Technologies

Cavium, Inc. showcased a range of NVMe over Fabric solutions including FC-NVMe on Gen 6 FC and NVMe over Fabrics concurrently over RoCE and iWARP on FastLinQ 45000/41000 Series Ethernet NICs at VMworld US 2017.

The NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) specification is an emerging technology that gives data center networks unprecedented access to NVMe SSD storage. It delivers efficient scaling of NVMe-based SSDs over data center fabrics including RDMA networks (iWARP and RoCE), as well as FC. This enables higher VM density by delivering faster, more scalable connections between servers and storage, as well as between storage controllers and NVMe enclosures.

The company is a provider in the transition to NVMe-oF by enabling a range of performance solutions that transition customer infrastructure and applications to next-generation NVMe flash-based platforms, and is the only solution supplier offering both NVMe-oF over Universal RDMA and FC. (1)

VMworld, hosted by VMware, Inc., is an event for enabling the digital enterprise.

The company’s participation in VMworld US 2017 spans multiple demonstrations and product showcases, which include:

• Demo: Performance from an end-to-end FC-NVMe solution with QLogic Gen 6 FC delivering more than two million NVMe IO/s on the SPDK-based software-defined storage framework.

• Demo: Solution that delivers technology choice and investment protection to customers with concurrent RoCE and iWARP transports for NVMe-oF.

• Product showcase: FastLinQ 10/25/50/100GbE NICs and CNAs, QLogic Enhanced Gen 5 and Gen 6 FC adapters, LiquidIO 10/25Gbps NICs and NITROX XL adapters

QLogic NVMe over FC (FC-NVMe) solution
Next-generation, data-intensive workloads utilize low latency NVMe flash-based sorage to meet ever increasing user demand. By combining the lossless, highly deterministic nature of FC with NVMe, FC-NVMe delivers the performance, application response time, and scalability needed for next-generation data centers, while leveraging existing FC infrastructure. Currently shipping QLogic 2690 Series of Enhanced Gen 5 and 2700 Series of Gen 6 FC adapters are FC-NVMe ready and are being evaluated in FC-NVMe fabrics by multiple customers and partners.

FastLinQ NVMe over Ethernet Universal RDMA (NVMe-oF) solution
Driven by the performance demands of NVMe, high-performance, low-latency networking is a requirement for a fabric to scale out. Ethernet-based RDMA fabrics with their low latency and offload capabilities will become a popular choice for NVMe-oF. FastLinQ 45000/41000 Series Ethernet NICs support Universal RDMA (RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP concurrently) and deliver a choice to customers for scaling out NVMe over a general-purpose Ethernet fabric.

LiquidIO NICs
LiquidIO 10/25/40GbE NICs/network appliance adapters accelerate performance for SDN and NFV application by offloading Open vSwitch with various server virtualization, security, and network virtualization processing including overlay networks, IPsec, distributed firewall, DPI for application recognition and dynamic service chaining with cloud configuration.

NITROX adapters
NITROX XL adapters offer solutions from a few hundred Mb/s to 100Gb/s of encryption bandwidth and from a few thousand to 130,000 2048b RSA operations per second. These adapters also offer up to 100Gb/s of compression support. NITROX FIPS Adapters offer from a few thousand to over a million symmetric, as well as from a few hundred to 35,000 asymmetric operations per second. These adapters provide 32 runtime elastic FIPS/HSM partitions. Both adapters are heavily used for OEM, as well as NFV solutions. In addition, cloud data centers utilize the NITROX FIPS adapters to meet compliance requirements.

FastLinQ 40000 Series 10/25/40/50/100GbE, QLogic 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 16GFC and 2700 Series Gen 6 32GFC adapters are available from the firm, and OEMs and ODMs.

LiquidIO 10/25/40Gb/s Smart NICs and NITROX adapters are available from the company.

(1) See Accelerate Live Migration with iWarp using Cavium FastLinQ 25GbE