Toshiba Memory America and Newisys Demo HPC NVMe-oF

Toshiba Memory America, Inc. (TMA) and Newisys, a Sanmina Corporation product division, demonstrated an HPC NVMe-oF (NVM Express over Fabrics) ⁽¹⁾ solution at SuperComputing SC17 Conference.

NVMe-oF brings direct-connect NVMe SSD performance to the storage fabric with the flexibility of disaggregated storage. It provides scale-out, cloud data centers with software-defined, NVMe-oF storage that centralizes and virtualizes NVMe SSDs across the network, making them highly available to compute nodes at near DAS performance.

The demonstration features Newisys’ next-generation NVMe-oF hardware platform, the NSS1160G-2N, an evolution of their recent, NVMe-oF storage system design. It is a 1U storage system with dual-node and dual-socket Xeon ⁽²⁾ processors and supports up to 4x100GbE network interface cards (NICs). Each node has eight Toshiba NVMe U.2 SSDs ⁽³⁾ (16 NVMe drives per system) directly connected to the CPU, minimizing latency.

Toshiba is making the demo possible with its target engine software to provide storage virtualization and SSD/flash management, which is critical to realize the promise of NVMe-oF connectivity. With an NVMe-oF standardized protocol, Toshiba’s storage node software delivers the performance of NVMe SSDs to compute nodes for HPC data set load and unload times by delivering the bandwidth of direct-attached NVMe SSDs with inherent network efficiencies.

Other key features of Toshiba’s NVMe target engine are:

• Abstraction, total virtualization and HA of NVMe-based flash storage

• Provisioning of storage and namespaces to compute nodes and VMs

• REST API (application programming interface) to connect to popular orchestration frameworks

“NVMe-oF enables new levels of storage performance and flexibility for HPC and cloud data centers,” said Steve Fingerhut, SVP and GM, SSD and cloud software business units, Toshiba Memory America. “Toshiba’s software provides a critical building block for data centers to realize the potential of NVMe-oF. Our software delivers an NVMe target engine that enables compute nodes to efficiently use the very high performance and storage capacities of NVMe SSDs.“

“Sanmina customers rely on us to deliver innovation to them,” said Eugene McCabe, EVP, enterprise computing and storage, Sanmina. “Our collaboration with Toshiba demonstrates our commitment to innovation by proving new technologies, like NVMe-oF, in a real-world application environment.“

⁽¹⁾ NVM Express is a registered trademark, and NVMe-oF and NVMe are trademarks of NVM Express, Inc.
⁽²⁾ Intel and Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.
⁽³⁾ Toshiba SSDs were used for this demo, but the Toshiba NVMe-oF storage node software supports non-Toshiba NVMe SSDs as well.