Computex: AIC With Intel, E8 Storage and Mellanox Unveils Performance and Centralized NVMe Storage Solutions

AIC Inc. bring out a whole series of products at 2017 Computex Taipei, Taiwan.

With a separate zone for all-flash-array NVMe products, the company showcased a complete product line of all-flash-array NVMe storage servers, including a 1U 10-bay server, 2U 24-bay server which supports single/dual-port NVMe SSDs, and 2U 4-node hyperconverged NVMe server.

This year, the firm collaborates with strategic partners – Intel Corp., E8 Storage Systems Ltd., and Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. – to showcase a live demo of E8 Storage’s performance centralized NVMe storage solution. The E8-D24 storage appliance based on company’s server platform architecture (Storage – HA202E-PH and high-density rack server – AIC Smart Rack), is equipped with Intel DC D3700 dual-port NVMe SSDs and Mellanox’s high-speed Ethernet adaptors.

The platform by the company’s products provides a reliable and performance storage solution. The 2U 24-bay server supports dual-port NVMe SSDs (U.2) with dual controllers support ‘active/active’ operation for instant failover between controller nodes. The platform includes support for 10GbE, PCIe NTB or SAS communications options. Each controller node supports up to two Xeon processors from the E5-2600 v4 product family. With equipped battery backup and hot-swappable components, system downtime is kept to a minimum even in the event of failure or scheduled maintenance, thereby increasing system availability and delivering substantial savings for system management staff.

Deployed on the firm’s 2U 24-bay server, E8 Storage’s patented software architecture unlocks the performance of NVMe drives without sacrificing reliability or availability – features that are critical to enterprise IT data centers. The E8-D24 centralized NVMe storage solution provides the economic and architectural advantages of centralized storage to deliver the high I/O and low latency advantages of PCIe NVMe SSDs. Enterprises benefit from the increased capacity utilization of a centralized solution, avoiding the islands of underutilized storage when deploying local SSDs inside of compute servers. This would also save money by eliminating the need to pre-allocate server capacity for future use at today’s higher prices ⁽¹⁾.

E8-D24 storage appliance

The E8-D24 HA centralized NVMe storage solution is deployed by tier-one financial firms on Wall Street ⁽²⁾, and the complete hardware and software solution is now in full production in customer data centers. E8 Storage’s HA and fault-tolerant architecture ensures data availability and BC, improving developers’ access to data and increasing productivity. Compared to others, E8 Storage appliances have the advantage of tight hardware integration, improving overall productivity, ease of use and TCO. The E8-D24 consolidates storage capacity into a single pool of performance flash that is shared among computing resources while delivering performance on par with local SSDs. The result is improved capacity utilization (up to 90%), a reduction in the overall number of drives required, and savings to the customer regarding money spent on short- and long-term storage capacity.

“E8 Storage looks for hardware partners that can meet our stringent availability and reliability requirements for our system architecture. AIC’s server products are a strong fit for us, and they have been a strategic partner to E8 Storage during the development of our products,” said Zivan Ori, CEO and co-founder, E8 Storage. “We are pleased with the early success of E8 Storage and with the strong support of our partner, AIC.“

DC D3700 series dual-port NVMe

The Intel DC D3700 series dual-port NVMe combined with the E8 Storage HA NVMe Solution achieves NVMe shared storage ⁽³⁾. This series are special SSDs to address dual-port PCIe SSDs HA design. This architecture is used to address a critical redundancy and failover, protecting against to a single path failure. That means that the SSD has a capability to be connected to two hosts at a time, they can be connected directly to a host CPU or via PCIe switch topology if higher SSD count is required. It would look very similar to SAS-based HA storage design but implemented with PCIe bus. Dual-port NVMe is another way for HA topologies. As the product SSD is available in single form factor – 2.5″ U.2, sharing similar connector as before. That means it still has four lanes of PCIe Gen3 as in original design, but for dual-port designs, it splits into the pair by two, so 2xPCIe Gen3 x2. Therefore the system must have new backplane which has a PCIe properly routed to two hosts with or without PCIe switches to support new connectivity.

Intel DC D3700/D3600 SSD

The DC D3700 Series SSDs are based on NVMe 1.2 specification, which introduces features for all NVMe SSDs ⁽⁴⁾. The one of those is multiple Namespace support. You can make here an analogy with SCSI LUNs, so a single SSD can be partitioned into multiple hardware partitions where a namespace can be assigned to two hosts or otherwise dedicated to a single host. And this allows isolating the partition from another host until a critical failure on assigned host happened. The distributed architecture and software stack allow the customer to achieve NVMe performance of their remote drives (both throughput and bandwidth) and with minimal impact on NVMe latency (as compared to local NVMe drive usage). The performance storage solution scales with capacity while maintaining the same level of performance expected from local storage inside the servers. The disaggregated architecture allows storage capacity to be dynamically allocated, augmented or replaced, without impacting the rack’s performance or requiring maintenance downtime ⁽¹⁾.

E8 Storage integrates its rack-scale flash architecture with the Mellanox ConnectX-4 NICs (Network Interface Cards) ⁽¹⁾, thus enabling converged networking with very low latency and high throughput and bandwidth. Since it combines the benefits of local flash and NVMe with the benefits of centralized storage and HA, this is suitable for hyper-scale data centers and large data centers that are deploying NVMe devices today, as well as enterprise and private cloud efforts seeking next-generation all-flash arrays.

“As the provider of high-performance networking technology, Mellanox offers the most efficient end-to-end IB and Ethernet smart interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage,” said Kevin Deierling, VP, marketing, Mellanox. “Our solutions deliver unmatched throughput and latency and thus improve the overall data center computing efficiency, by delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance. We are pleased to partner with AIC at Computex 2017, and look forward to further collaboration between Mellanox and AIC.“

“AIC is always in the forefront and working towards to new generations of technology. We started to work with Intel as a close partner for years; furthermore, AIC is ready to integrate Intel’s next generation solution for 3D NAND Flash SSDs and Intel Optane Memory Technology into our products, and so on Intel ready to launch,” said Michael Liang, CEO, AIC. “AIC committed to the development of the highest quality products as the goal, strategic alliance for all partners, to provide customers Turnkey Solutions. We offer our products and services as ‘Hardware Plus Software,’ and provide customers the one take solution. Designing the best quality solutions for our customer is always the ultimate goal for AIC’s ongoing effort.“

⁽¹⁾ E8-Storage Mellanox Joint Solution Brief
⁽²⁾ Tier-1 financial firm selects E8 storages centralized NVMe appliance
⁽³⁾  E8 Storage
⁽⁴⁾ An introduction to dual port NVMe SSD