Mellanox Into Flash Storage Access

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. showed at Flash Memory Summit 2015 a set of storage demonstrations and performance benchmark results which showcase how customers can accelerate applications, analyze data faster, and lower expenditures using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology to share solid-state storage.

Mellanox Spectrum Ethernet switch

“The higher performance of solid state storage demands higher performance from the interconnect technology in order for businesses to realize the true power of their data centers and the information they hold,” stated Kevin Deierling, VP, marketing, Mellanox. “Customers have been clear that when they invest in flash storage, they want to share it across multiple servers using the most efficient networking available to maximize their ROI. Nearly everyone who wants to demonstrate fast fabric access to flash is using Mellanox products, and we are excited to show these solutions with our partners.“

During the Flash Memory Summit, Mellanox and key partners demonstrated the following solutions that illustrate how high-speed networking empowers solid state storage technologies:

• Apeiron Data Systems, Inc. demonstrated their Data Fabric;

• Phase-change memory (PCM) access over EDR 100Gb/s IB with access latency of less than 2μs with HGST, Inc.;

• NMX-series Server SAN and NVMe over Fabrics powered by the company to achieve millions of IO/s with Mangstor, Inc.;

• NVMe Over Fabrics network access to NVMe devices with industry leading high performance and low latency, using both RDMA Over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and IB was demonstrated with Beijing Memblaze Technology Co. Ltd, Micron Technology, Inc., and ; PMC-Sierra, Inc.

• iSCSI over RDMA (iSER) access to a flash array with extremely high throughput and IO/s, was demonstrated with Micron Technology, Inc., Saratoga Speed, Inc., and others;

• NetApp Inc. EF560 flash array with iSER capability using Mellanox FDR 56Gb/s IB technology;

• Next generation NVRAM replication over a RDMA network exhibiting very low latency with PMC-Sierra, Inc.;

• Next generation NVMe flash technology with key applications (Samsung Semiconductor);

• InfiniFlash array with high IO/s Ceph performance using Mellanox 40GbE networking with SanDisk Corporation.

Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx 10/25/40/50Gb/s Ethernet adapter

Mellanox showcased new technologies that expedite access to solid state storage, including the Spectrum 10/25/40/50/100GbE switch, ConnectX-4 100GEt and IB adapter, and ConnectX-4 Lx 10/25/40/50GbE adapter.