Microsemi and American Megatrends Collaborating

Microsemi Corporation and American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) announced their collaboration on the development of an NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) reference architecture solution.

This solution incorporates AMI’s MegaRAC FP-X Fabric Management Firmware technology with the company’s Switchtec PCIe switches on an Intel Corp. Rack Scale Design (Intel RSD) reference architecture.

RSD caters to the specific needs of data center operators, with the ability to efficiently scale and lower operational costs via resource pooling and leverage best-in-class storage, networking and virtualization technologies. With resource pooling a key benefit of the RSD architecture, the company provides the fabric interconnect infrastructure with its high density, low power PCIe switches. The combination of technologies from these three companies provides essential building blocks for OEM and original design manufacturer (ODM) customers in the hyperscale data center and enterprise markets.

“As Intel RSD and AMI’s MegaRAC software are widely adopted by major data center OEM, ODM and hyperscale customers, we are pleased our innovative Switchtec PCIe switches are an integral part of the RSD ecosystem,” said Pete Hazen, VP and business unit manager, storage solutions, Microsemi. “Collaborating with AMI and Intel as part of Microsemi’s Accelerate Ecosystem Program supports our goal to deliver leading-edge, turnkey solutions for data center customers worldwide.“

The RSD implementation can utilize NVMe-oF to manage pooled storage for increased performance and efficiency, including higher resource utilization and lower total cost of operation. Administrators can compose systems from pools of storage tiers to deliver workload-optimized systems for their end users. For example, an intensive I/O workload such as Somatic MUtation FINder (SMuFin) ⁽¹⁾ running on multiple servers attached with individual local NVMe storage can complete the same operation in the same running time on the RSD implementation with a disaggregated NVMe storage model. This can lower storage hardware costs by up to two-thirds. In addition to the benefits of improved performance and resource utilization, the combined resources of Microsemi and AMI translate to direct regional support for customers on a global basis.

“Microsemi and AMI continue to be valuable collabo,ors in bringing OEM solutions based on Intel RSD to market,” said Figen Ulgen, GM, rack scale design, Intel. “This latest collaboration on NVMe over Fabrics with Intel RSD will offer data center operators even greater business agility and efficiency.“

OEMs and ODMs can leverage the benefits of combining the MegaRAC development framework with the enhancements from RSD and Switchtec PCIe switches to lower development costs and speed time to market. The company’s dynamic switch partitioning technolgy, supported by Switchtec PCIe switchs in combination with its Flashtec non-volatile random-access memory (NVRAM) cards and NVMe controllers, enables rapid deployment of NVMe-oF solutions, while offloading CPU utilization and practically eliminating system double date rate (DDR) bandwidth requirements. This leads to better overall throughput, latency and QoS.

According to G2M Research, Inc.’s NVMe Ecosystem Market Sizing Report, the NVMe market will be more than $60 billion by 2021.

“We are witnessing how NVMe-oF is quickly supplanting traditional methods of storage access. This, combined with the ability to quickly and easily compose and decompose pooled resources via Intel RSD, increases utilization therefore lowering total cost of operation,” said Subramonian Shankar, president, founder and CEO, AMI. “As such, we are excited about the capabilities inherent in this combined AMI, Intel and Microsemi solution for the opportunity it represents to better serve new and existing OEM and ODM customers. We also look forward to even greater collaboration between Microsemi and AMI for a variety of product lines including PCIe switches, RAID technology and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).“

NVMe-oF solutions are suited for the hyperscale data center and enterprise markets for NVMe storage pooling applications. The device will also be targeted at applications including extending pooling to other end points, such as FPGAs and general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs).

The jointly developed NVMe-oF solution is available through AMI and its distribution channels.

⁽¹⁾ Somatic MUtation FINder (SMuFin) workload provided under license by Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Resources:
MegaRAC FP-X Fabric Management Firmware