NetApp Selecting Mellanox ConnectX 100Gb/s IB Adapters

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that NetApp, Inc. has selected ConnectX 100Gb/s IB adapters for two of its advanced storage platforms EF570 and E5700.

Both the EF570 all-flash system and the E5700 hybrid flash system support 100Gb/s NVMe over Fabrics on IB with ConnectX-4 based adapters. The platform delivers price-performance that accelerates database, technical computing, big data analytics, and video processing workloads.

EF570 price/performance was demonstrated by SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmark tests. As tan enterprise NVMe-over-IB systems, the solution performs with 1 million+ sustained IO/s, 21GB/s throughput, and sub-100μs latency. This performance is critical to perform real-time analytics to allow businesses to gain insight from an increasing amount of unstructured data, as well as to drive faster database, analytics, video processing, and technical computing performance. The EF5700 also offers 100Gb/s NVMe-over-IB in a hybrid flash system that for enterprise applications.

The ConnectX family of Virtual Protocol Interconnect adapters support both IB and Ethernet and offer RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) features and capabilities and future-proofs data center investments by supporting speeds of 10, 25, 40, 50, and 100Gb/s. With support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), ConnectX-4 allows platforms to support the storage protocols including iSCSI, iSER, NVMe-over-Fabrics, and SRP (SCSI RDMA Protocol).

“NetApp is an innovation leader when it comes to storage performance, connectivity, and efficiency,” said Eric Stoltman, VP and GM, hyperscale group, NetApp. “We are proud to work with Mellanox to deliver faster network connections, innovative new protocols, and faster performance to our customers in our E-series arrays.“

“NVMe over Fabrics is the newest, most efficient block storage protocol and EDR IB is the fastest, lowest-latency storage fabric technology,” said Michael Kagan, CTO, Mellanox. “It’s very exciting to see NetApp support both with their EF570 and E5700 platforms.“

“It’s clear that faster storage controllers and faster drives need faster network connections to realize their full value,” said Arun Taneja founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. “NetApp is one of the first, if not the first, enterprise vendor to support NVMe over Fabrics with 100Gb/s IB. Given Mellanox’s historic leadership in high-speed networking, it’s no surprise that they are doing it with Mellanox-based adapters.“