Cavium FastLinQ 10/25GbE Ethernet NICs Power Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solutions

Cavium, Inc. announced that its family of FastLinQ 10/25GbE Ethernet NICs powers hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions from iWindows Storage Spaces Direct, VMware vSAN, and HPE SimpliVity enabling linear scalability and predictable performance.

The FastLinQ 10/25GbE family, with millions of Ethernet ports shipped, a flexible architecture and scalable high performance, is for accelerating HCI solutions and is among the top choices for enterprise cloud data centers.

In the era of hybrid cloud and DevOps, IT departments are under pressure to move faster and be more agile. Traditional architectures driven by complex manual processes and non-integrated infrastructures cannot deliver the power, simplicity, and velocity that is necessary to meet the demands of the modern enterprise. HCI systems provide a simple, efficient, software-defined platform that combines networking and storage along with orchestration software delivering the agility and economics of cloud for on-premises infrastructure. HCI systems empower IT to reduce cost and complexity while delivering service agility. Ethernet forms the networking backbone connecting HCI systems together and networking requirements can grow exponentially as these systems scale. The success of HCIs requires a resilient and scalable network architecture built on high-speed Ethernet NICs that ensure performance and availability.

Click to enlarge

“HCI architectures encompass software defined methodologies that integrate compute, storage, and networking on commodity hardware to deliver a cost-effective solution that is simple to deploy, manage and scale. HCI is a fundamental building block of on-premises data centers for enterprises building hybrid clouds where 25GbE connectivity is in high demand,” said Cliff Grossner, senior research director and advisor of cloud and data center research practice, IHS Markit Ltd.

In a recent IHS Markit report ^[1], it was forecasted that 25GbE ports will represent 31% of total Ethernet adapter ports shipped in CY’21, signaling a strong need for Ethernet adapters that provide predictable low latency connectivity under fully loaded conditions.

“Cavium FastLinQ 10/25GbE Ethernet NICs with Universal RDMA are designed to accelerate networking for HCIs while offloading server CPU,” said Christopher Moezzi, VP, marketing, Ethernet adapter group, Cavium. “Customers deploying a wide range of HCI options from HPE, VMware and Microsoft can now leverage Cavium NICs to enable scale and flexibility to implement radical infrastructure simplification while reducing cost with 10GBASE-T.“

Ravi Rao, group manager, Windows networking, Microsoft Corp. said: “Software-defined hyperconverged storage with Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct are key elements of Windows Server software-defined solution offerings that enable flexible, economical, and high-performance data centers. Software-defined data center Premium qualified Cavium FastLinQ 45000/41000 Series of 10/25GbE NICs with support for RoCE, RoCEv2, and iWARP deliver the ability to power software-defined Storage Spaces Direct architectures built using Windows Server 2016.“

“As customers deal with the rapid proliferation of apps and seek alternatives to legacy infrastructure, hyperconverged platforms are becoming a popular choice for modern workload deployment,” said McLeod Glass, VP, SimpliVity, software-defined and cloud product management, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (HPE). “We are proud to offer HPE Ethernet 10GbE NICs based on Cavium FastlinQ 8400 series technology as options for our flagship SimpliVity 380 hyperconverged infrastructure portfolio that enables customers to precisely align our technology with an organization’s unique IT environment and workloads.“

Click to enlarge

Purpose built for accelerating and simplifying data center networking,
FastLinQ Ethernet technology delivers:

• Enterprise features – A spectrum of Ethernet speeds ranging from 10GbE to 100GbE to host the most demanding enterprise, telco and cloud applications leveraging hyperconverged architectures. The company’s SmartAN technology enables adaptive link controls for zero-touch interoperability with industry wide 25GbE switches and cables. Extensive and support of a variety of hypervisors like VMware ESXi, Windows Server Hyper-V, Xenserver and KVM for integration on diverse hyperconverged platforms.

• Acceleration and scalability for HCI – Industry’s network adapter that delivers the choice and investment protection with concurrent support for RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP. Acceleration for network virtualization by offloading protocol processing for VxLAN, NVGRE, GRE and GENEVE enables customers to build and scale virtualized networks without impacting network performance.

• Storage acceleration – Concurrent protocol offload for NVMe-oF, NVMe-Direct, SMB Direct, iSER, iSCSI and FCoE delivers up to 5 million IO/s while consuming the fewer server CPU cycles, leaving headroom for virtual applications and higher ROI on server investments with seamless upgrade paths of next-generation storage connectivity.

• Comprehensive network adapter portfolio – The company offers a broad set of Ethernet networking adapters – FastLinQ Standard Ethernet adapters, Converged Networking adapters and LiquidIO SmartNICs that cover the entire spectrum of customer Ethernet connectivity and offload requirements.

The FastLinQ Series 10/25Gbps Ethernet adapters are qualified for VMware vSAN and Windows S2D and are available from the company and OEMs and ODMs worldwide.

LiquidIO 10/25GbE SmartNICs are available through the firm. 10GbE I/O options based on FastLinQ 8400 series technology for HPE SimpliVity DL380 are available from HPE.

^[1] Information based on IHS Markit, Technology Group, September 2017 Ethernet Network Adapter Equipment Quarterly Market Tracker.