RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)

The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) released a new capability, bringing the power of the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) I/O architecture to Ethernet-based business solutions. The new specification is called RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), pronounced ‘Rocky.’ Products based on RoCE will reach the market during the coming year.

RoCE, built on a foundation of the highly efficient use of computing resources, brings significant benefits to end users. By reducing the number of servers needed, eliminating cabling and improving application performance, RoCE can produce energy savings and reduce the footprint of Ethernet-based data centers. Its unique ‘one fat pipe’ approach to server I/O gives the user great flexibility in deploying applications and is an excellent complement to virtualization strategies being deployed today. By attacking latency, RoCE increases performance in search, database, financial and high transaction rate applications.

“RoCE addresses a key concern of the enterprise – maximizing and protecting current investments in IT,” said Cindy Borovick, research vice president, Datacenter Networks at IDC. “RoCE leverages field-proven RDMA, ubiquitous Ethernet and fabric management solutions. This will benefit data center network end users by consolidating data, storage and clustered networking and reducing costs.”

RDMA and low latency clustering has dominated the high performance computing space, as evidenced by the most recent TOP500 list. For data center and cloud environments, RDMA is enjoying increasing adoption in business solutions such as data warehousing, financial services and transaction processing.

Low latency and RDMA capabilities in data center fabrics enable end-users to achieve significantly higher and deterministic transaction rates while increasing the efficiency of clustered servers and storage systems and reducing energy consumption – resulting in significant ROI benefits.

RoCE is implemented in and downloadable in the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) 1.5.1. Many Linux distributions, which include OFED, support a wide and rich range of middleware and application solutions such as IPC, sockets, messaging, virtualization, SAN, NAS, file systems and databases. RoCE can therefore deliver all three dimensions of unified networking on Ethernet – IPC, NAS and SAN.

“The new RoCE specification, with a purpose-built and proven RDMA transport, provides the most efficient and light-weight transport over Layer 2 Ethernet,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing at Voltaire and member of the IBTA Steering Committee. “RoCE is expected to enable the enterprise data center to serve more clients with a broader range of applications – all while providing faster response times and reducing the number of servers, cables and switches required.”

The IBTA is led by a steering committee that includes IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Oracle, QLogic, System Fabric Works and Voltaire.