FMS: Broadcom Reveals NVMe-oF Storage Adapter Solution

Broadcom Inc. announced an NVMe-oF storage adapter solution designed to simplify storage disaggregation and accelerate the adoption of storage over fabrics in cloud and enterprise networks.

The solution enables a server to connect to a large number of SSDs on the network and communicate with these SSDs as if they were local drives.

Until now NVMe-oF was only available on servers running recent versions of the Linux OS, so any server running legacy Linux, Windows or hypervisors like VMware ESXi and Hyper-V were not supported. The Glass Creek adapter provides OS independence by presenting a standard NVMe interface to the host, extending the reach of NVMe-oF to any server.

Powered by the company’s Stingray SoC with hardware accelerators for RAID, de-dupe and security, the 50Gb Glass Creek adapter delivers performance of one million IO/s in a standard full-height, half-length (FHHL) PCIe card form factor.

Using any inbox NVMe driver, this solution allows customers to connect remote disaggregated storage like local storage while reaping the benefits of local NVMe performance, fabrics based scalability, and associated cost efficiency in addition to ease of deployment.

Features and benefits

• Standard NVMe host driver on any OS expanding NVMe-oF to 100% of storage market

• NVMe physical function (PF) and 64 NVMe virtual functions (VF) for deployment in bare metal and virtualized servers

• 50GbE bandwidth and one million random read IO/s

• Hardware acceleration for RAID, de-dupe and storage encryption

• Supports RoCE and NVMe/TCP for use in any standard Ethernet network

• Octal ARM A72 cores @3GHz providing ARM CPU performance

• x8 FHHL industry standard PCIe adapter

• Two 25GbE ports

“With the introduction of the Glass Creek adapter we are excited to announce a game changing technology that dramatically simplifies storage disaggregation,” said Dan Harding, VP, marketing, compute and connectivity division, Broadcom. “Glass Creek takes the NVMe-oF industry another major step forward by providing seamless fabric connectivity to any OSs while delivering one million IO/s of performance using standard inbox NVMe drivers.“

The company is sampling Glass Creek NVMe-oF adapter to qualified customers supporting 2x25GbE interface.