Cavium: FC-NVMe Protocol Unified Driver for Servers Running Enterprise Linux From Red Hat and SUSE

Cavium, Inc. announced the availability of a unified driver that enables native support for FC-NVMe protocol for servers running enterprise Linux from Red Hat, Inc. and SUSE LLC.

QLogic FC2690

This unified driver delivers simultaneous support for FCP-SCSI and FC-NVMe protocols on the same port for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3 kernel version 4.4.120 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5. The company is engaged with major OSVs to enable native FC-NVMe support on other platforms as well.

The firm chairs the INCITS T11 standards committee on FC-NVMe that has been driving the definition and development of the FC-NVMe protocol over the past three years, and is at the forefront of support for NVMe over FC.

This unified driver works with both the company’s QLogic 2690 family of Gen5 (16Gb FC) FC adapters, as well as the QLogic 2700 family of Gen6 (32Gb FC) FC adapters for flexible deployment.

QLogic 2700

The unified driver with native FC-NVMe support enables flash storage to further accelerate mission critical workloads, such as ERP, business intelligence and messaging and collaboration systems by:

• Lowering read access times to networked storage

• Reducing processing time with a streamlined and simplified protocol interface compared to SCSI

• Increasing scalability and improving response times with a highly parallelized architecture and extremely deep queuing structures

“Cavium has long been at the forefront of storage innovation, and we’re excited to be working with our partners to bring FC-NVMe technology to market. FC-NVMe represents a natural progression for SAN connectivity, and provides value by delivering performance gains that leverage existing infrastructure. FC-NVMe couples extremely scalable, low latency flash storage with the most reliable, secure and widely deployed storage network in the data center allowing customers to continue to scale their infrastructure to meet future business needs“, said Vikram Karvat, VP and GM, FC storage group, Cavium.

“Broadcom is modernizing FC for the next wave of technology innovation coming with NVMe storage,” said Jack Rondoni, SVP and GM, Brocade storage networking division, Broadcom, Inc. “Brocade Gen 6 FC directors and switches are at the heart of the transition to NVMe with purpose-built SAN technology designed to address the low latency and reliability requirements for NVMe-based storage. Brocade and Cavium QLogic have a long history of development, integration, and testing that ensures our shared customers can deploy NVMe solutions with confidence.“

“Cavium QLogic worked closely with SUSE in the development of NVMe over FC drivers on SUSE Enterprise Linux Server,” said Olaf Kirch, VP Linux Enterprise, SUSE. “FC-NVMe is an exciting development for the storage industry, offering improved storage solutions to meet tomorrow’s challenges. Cavium and SUSE are committed to serving our customers’ needs for superior FC storage solutions.“