Chelsio: iWARP RDMA With Windows Server 2016 Storage Replica

Chelsio Communications, Inc. announced the showcasing of its latest T6 iWARP RDMA adapters with the Windows Server 2016 Storage Replica (SR) across local and long-haul connections. 

The results shown at the Microsoft Ignite 2017 conference in Orlando, FL, demonstrate SR operating at 25Gb/s using SMB3.1.1 over Chelsio’s T6225-CR RDMA enabled NICs, with performance levels. The demonstration confirms iWARP’s ability to sustain SR’s load pattern, and thanks to its TCP/IP underpinnings, natively operate beyond a cluster environment to extend the RDMA transport over long distance.

HA and disaster protection are critical requirements for BC, and SR offers local and remote replication for redundancy in the face of infrastructure failure and catastrophic events. SR enables block-level replication between clusters or individual servers. It provides two modes of operation: synchronous replication enables mirroring of data with zero data loss at the file system level, while asynchronous replication allows local completion of I/O operations.

Storage Replica over iWARP RDMA combines performance with the efficiency provided by the zero copy and CPU bypass operation of the iWARP RDMA transport, without requiring any metro extension equipment, unlike other RDMA transports.

The Microsoft Ignite presentation shows SR operating in synchronous mode over a 50km fiber loop, connecting two storage servers. Long distance replication is shown to provide near local access performance levels, with negligible impact on I/O rates and near zero additional latency. In addition, the iWARP RDMA transport provides stable and consistent operation.

“The demonstration of Windows Server 2016 Storage Replica over RDMA in metro scale conditions is a milestone for both SR and iWARP,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO, Chelsio. “The combination of SR capabilities and performance, and iWARP’s efficiency, ease of deployment and Cloud reach is hard to beat. This demo confirms iWARP’s long distance operation capabilities and cements its position as the correct RDMA transport for storage, with robustness and performance that scale from datacenter-wise clusters to Internet-wide environments.”

Ned Pyle, principal program manager, Windows Server and storage, Microsoft Corp., said: “Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 offer our most cloud-ready server OS ever, with exciting new innovations to help transform applications for the cloud, build a software-defined datacenter with cloud efficiencies, and keep IT safer than ever. The complementary solutions and services from our partners are what truly brings the innovation to life for our customers as they transform their IT solutions for the cloud-first world. Chelsio’s iWARP technology brings long-haul networking and ease of use to RDMA’s already impressive latency and throughout. Microsoft’s Storage Replica, Storage Spaces Direct, and SMB engineering teams believe RDMA is the future of the software-defined datacenter fabric, and that iWARP is on the cutting edge of that revolution.”

As a long-standing partner of Microsoft, Chelsio invests in joint engineering resources and expertise to test and validate upcoming versions of Windows software on Chelsio networking infrastructure. Continuing on this tradition of cooperative engineering, it is committed to delivering high-performance iWARP networking adapter support for Windows Server 2016 environments as well as for Windows 10 Enterprise.