Chelsio Demos NVMe Over Fabrics

Chelsio Communications, Inc., provider of (10Gb/25Gb/40Gb/50Gb/100Gb) Ethernet adapters for storage networking, virtualized enterprise datacenters, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments, announced a demonstration of NVMe over Fabrics using the its T5 40GbE iWARP RDMA adapters and Samsung Electronics’ enterprise NVMe SSDs. 

The demonstration is based on software conforming to the draft specification of NVMe over Fabrics as defined by the NVM Express, Inc.

NVMe provides a standards-based approach for PCIe SSD access that improves performance by reducing latency and streamlining the command set, while providing support for security and end-to-end data protection. 

NVMe over Fabrics defines an efficient mechanism to utilize these devices in large scale storage deployments and provides investment protection by allowing the latest in innovations and advances in low latency SSD flash to be used over proven Ethernet iWARP (RDMA/TCP) networking. This enables the NVMe storage devices to be shared, pooled and managed more effectively.  

The Chelsio demonstration is aimed at providing a foundation for lower latency and increased performance, while providing improved iWARP integration for flash-based storage.

With its low-latency T5 40GbE iWARP solution, which can reliably operate with Ethernet PAUSE frames disabled, Chelsio demonstrates that accessing flash remotely does not need to come at the expense of performance, scalability or error recovery.  

Chelsio T5 Unified Wire offering enables a seamless migration path to 25/50/100GbE later in 2016 and 200/400GbE in the future, while offering the flexibility to leverage existing software investments.

Chelsio’s technology inherits the resilience and congestion management capabilities of TCP/IP and as such can turn any Ethernet topology into a resilient fabric. Unlike competing tecnologies, it does not require a lossless fabric or special switch features to operate. Therefore, end users can decouple the storage and switch upgrade cycles, and benefit from incremental installs.  Storage vendors in turn can deploy into any preexisting Ethernet infrastructure.

By adding less than 13μs latency (tuning continues) for remote versus local NVMe device access, iWARP can enable leading NVMe over Fabrics high-performance solutions.

Using iWARP, storage system OEMs and device vendors can also add fabric connectivity to any existing NVMe device. 

T5 40GbE iWARP NVMe over Fabrics benchmark paper, detailing the hardware/software configuration used and results achieved

NVMe over Fabrics Layering

“We are pleased to work with Samsung on development of the next generation flash-optimized enterprise storage. Our 40GbE iWARP RDMA delivers ‘no compromise’ efficiency for NVMe Fabrics and flash applications,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO, Chelsio. “Customers acquire flash storage to share it across multiple applications using the most efficient networking available to maximize ROI.  iWARP-enabled storage solutions will be a critical tool in meeting these business goals.”

“Maximizing the efficiency of server CPUs is a major priority for datacenter architects,” said Michael Williams, VP, memory product planning, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. “The Chelsio demonstration provides yet another example of how our high-performance NVMe solid state drives can help datacenters get the most out of their infrastructure assets, and drive down latency at the same time.”