E8 Storage Adding Mellanox IB Support to NVMe Storage Solutions

E8 Storage Systems Ltd. announced availability of IB support to its NVMe storage solutions.

The move comes as a direct response to HPC customers that wish to take advantage of the speed, low latency throughput of IB for their data applications. The company support for IB will be for customers who now have the flexibility to connect via Ethernet or IB when paired with Mellanox Technologies Ltd.‘ ConnectX IB/VPI adapters.

“As our economy becomes more digitally-defined, HPC environments play a critical role in unlocking and harnessing the transformational power of data,” commented Scott Sinclair, senior analyst, ESG. “IB connectivity combined with the potential of flash as delivered by E8 Storage is an almost unstoppable partnership in terms of speed, low latency and scalability. Together, this makes E8 Storage and Mellanox a powerful combination for data center implementations and for databases that drive financial trading systems, real-time data analytics, and healthcare applications.“

The announcement also strengthens the company’s long-standing technology partnership with Mellanox that originally enabled the integration of the firm’s rack scale flash architecture with selected Mellanox adapters. Today, this relationship allows the company’s systems to attach directly to existing RDMA high performance networks over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) or IB connections and makes the firm’s support of IB possible especially in HPC environments where the majority of IB adoption is occurring. Like Ethernet, the IB products perform at 100Gb/s allowing enhanced scalability as the firm’s solutions are deployed.

According to the most recent Top 500 supercomputer rankings (Nov 2017), IB is the second most-used internal system interconnect technology.

Further, in a recent evaluation by Gilad Shainer, VP, marketing, HPC products, Mellanox, Mellanox accounts for 62% share of the compute clustering of the true HPC systems.

“We are very pleased that E8 Storage is expanding this partnership to offer full support for our IB products. Working closely together, our combined products can deliver the lightning-fast and highly scalable network necessary to power data intensive applications, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning that now drive today’s economy,” stated Scot Schultz, senior director, HPC/AI and technical computing, Mellanox.

“Today we demonstrate once again that E8 Storage’s architecture can expand, evolve and always extract the potential of flash performance,” comments Zivan Ori, co-founder and CEO, E8 Storage. “Partnering with market leaders like Mellanox that deliver the very best network connectivity technology ensures we continue to meet and, frequently, exceed the needs of our HPC customers even in their most demanding environments.“

The company’s software and appliances with IB support are available.