Cavium Supports FC-NVMe Standard

Cavium, Inc. announces support for the ratified NVMe over FC (FC-NVMe) 1.0 standard.

The company’s QLogic 2700 series Gen 6 and 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 FC HBAs support connecting NVMe storage over FC networks concurrently with the existing storage by using the updated firmware and drivers.

The FC-NVMe drivers are targeted towards customers connecting flash-based storage arrays to servers over FC networks. Pre-release software for the Linux OS is available for download by contacting company’s sales.

Three usage scenarios are supported:

Initiator mode: Drivers and firmware for hosts containing initiator mode QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 or 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 HBAs
Target mode: Drivers for storage servers or array controllers containing target mode QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 or 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 HBAs
Target mode (SPDK): Drivers (based on user mode SPDK technology) for storage servers or array controllers containing target mode QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 or 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 HBAs

INCITS/T11 committee for FC interfaces recently approved the standard ensuring concurrent support and interoperability for FC-NVMe and the existing FC protocols.

Craig Carlson, chairman, T11 standards committee on FC-NVMe, said: “Cavium was a leading contributor to the definition and development of the FC-NVMe standard. Cavium actively participated by contributing resources and talent to the effort, and when the committee was investigating the new technology, Cavium engineers took many of the ideas and created POC code and provided valuable and timely feedback.“

Workloads that demand higher throughput, IO/s and lower latency are moving to flash. The NVMe protocol has been designed for flash, and features parallelism, random access, and allows access to flash over PCIe to maximize bandwidth. FC-NVMe extends these benefits over a FC fabric. The low latency, lossless and efficient data handling capabilities of FC are suited to extend the performance and latency advantages of NVMe over a network.

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Benefits of adopting the company’s FC HBAs for flash environments include:

Technology leadership: Company’s chairs the T11 committee working group that developed the FC-NVMe standards, and contributed significant resources to work with ecosystem partners to develop this technology.
Innovation – The firm is driving innovation in software defined storage platforms with target mode drivers for the Storage Performance Developer Kit (SPDK) project, which provides performance, user-space device drivers enabling the next generation of storage platforms.
Performance: QLogic FC adapters have shown^[1] to deliver up to 2.6 million IO/s, and low latency, enabling the demanding enterprise workloads.
Standards compliance: Solutions meet IT standards for interoperability and support. This ensures that customers can deploy FC storage of their choice without worries about vendor lock-in or limited choice.
Investment protection: With the firm’s technology, FC-NVMe workloads can be introduced into existing FCP-SCSI fabrics. With QLogic 2700 and 2690 Series FC HBAs, FCP-SCSI and FC-NVMe protocol traffic can run concurrently without requiring any rip and replace of existing infrastructure.
Advanced SAN fabric management: QLogic StorFusion technology delivers a suite of diagnostics, rapid provisioning and QoS throughout the fabric which automate and simplify SAN deployment and orchestration.

“NVMe is a great advancement for the storage industry, driving down latencies and increasing IO/s. And FC-NVMe is an ideal storage protocol to take advantage of this technology transition. We believe FC is the right choice for NVMe storage because of its deterministic performance, resiliency, reliability and ubiquitous presence in the data center,” said Vikram Karvat, VP and GM, FC storage group, Cavium.

^[1]WP: The Performance Benefits of Gen6 FC