Infniband Trade Association Launching RoCE Initiative

The Infiniband Trade Association (IBTA) announced the launch of the RoCE Initiative to further the advancement of RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) technology and promote RoCE awareness.

The RoCE Initiative will provide education, case studies and resources to enable CIOs, enterprise data center architects and solutions engineers to achieve improved application performance and data center productivity.

“The RoCE Initiative will be the leading source for information on RDMA over Ethernet solutions,” said Barry Barnet, co-chair, steering committee, IBTA. “The IBTA remains committed to furthering the IB specification, of which RoCE is a part. The RoCE Initiative expands our potential audience and will enable us to deliver solution information and resources to those requiring the highest performing Ethernet networks.“

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Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) enables faster movement of data between servers and between servers and storage with much less work being done by the CPU. RoCE utilizes RDMA to enhance infrastructure solutions for hyper-converged data centers, cloud, storage, and virtualized environments (see RoCE video). The technology brings greater network utilization with lower latency and improved CPU efficiency, in addition to reducing overall financial investment by increasing server productivity while leveraging Ethernet technology. RoCE technology transports data across Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks, providing better raffic isolation and enabling hyperscale data center deployments.

The RoCE Initiative draws together members of the IBTA dedicated to demonstrating the performance and efficiency advantages of the technology and the value of a competitive multi-vendor ecosystem. RoCE is a standard RDMA solution available for Ethernet shipping in high volume, with millions of RoCE adapters deployed in hyperscale data centers. The architects of these advanced cloud and Web 2.0 platforms realize that RoCE enables better utilization of compute and storage resources, resulting in improved ROI on data center infrastructure. The RoCE Initiative will drive RoCE awareness and adoption into the next tier of advanced enterprise and private cloud data centers.

At Microsoft Ignite 2015, RoCE demonstrations showed that the technology is able to deliver remote flash storage access at the same throughput and latency performance as locally attached flash SSDs. The real-time demonstrations also underscored RoCE’s CPU offload benefit: an average 33% less CPU overhead than alternative solutions.