Mellanox Releases Open Source Code for Soft-RoCE to Accelerate Deployment of RDMA

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced the release of ‘Soft-RoCE‘ – a software-implementation of RDMA Over Converged Ethernet (RoCE).

Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro

Resulting from a joint development effort with IBM Corp. and System Fabric Works, Inc., the freely-available software implementation of RoCE enables servers and storage systems to communicate with RDMA using any industry-standard Ethernet adapter. Soft-RoCE enables full interoperability between industry-standard NICs and hardware accelerated solutions, providing businesses with the ability to use RDMA technology across their entire data center infrastructure.

The open source software supports the RoCE Initiative within the Infiniband Trade Association, which promotes multi-vendor RDMA over Ethernet solutions for cloud and enterprise data centers. Providing Soft-RoCE freely for Ethernet networks and interconnects accelerates the adoption of RDMA across a wide range of applications and environments. Soft-RoCE code is available.

“RDMA is becoming an increasingly important technology in the enablement of cloud-scale high-performance data center networks,” said Seamus Crehan, president, Crehan Research, Inc. “Simultaneously, these data center operators are embracing open source software-defined networking and storage. Soft-RoCE combines both of these factors, furthering efficiencies and performance improvements in data center network infrastructures.“

“The Mellanox ConnectX family of 10/25/40/50 and 100GbE adapter cards, include full RoCE hardware offloads, and are the world’s most widely deployed adapters supporting RDMA today,” said Michael Kagan, CTO, Mellanox. “These adapters offer world class performance capable of scaling to 100,000s of nodes for cloud, Web 2.0, big data, and storage applications. Soft-RoCE allows the protocol to become ubiquitous and available on any server with an Ethernet connection. Communication with a Soft-RoCE client allows storage and appliance vendors to showcase the performance, scalability, and efficiency benefits of hardware accelerated RoCE used in their platforms.“

Systems supporting hardware-accelerated RoCE adapters-such as the ConnectX-3 Pro are available from Dell, HP, Lenovo, IBM, Quanta, Supermicro, and other major server and storage manufacturers. Adapters supporting RoCE hardware acceleration will soon be available from other vendors.

“Canonical, the market leader in scale out and OpenStack production environments, is pleased to have Mellanox as a Ubuntu cloud partner to enable new network and data center models,” said John Zannos, VP, alliances and ecosystem, Canonical Ltd. “Accelerating network data in an OpenStack environment is important to customer deployments. Bringing Soft-RoCE capability to any Ethernet adapter shows Mellanox leadership in utilizing open source for production networks. We are pleased to see Soft-RoCE availability in Ubuntu today and look forward to even tighter integration in the future.“

More about ConnectX-3 Pro
More about RoCE and RoCE Initiative