Broadcom, NetApp and SUSE: Production Availability of End-to-End NVMe Over FC Solution Enabling Application Performance

Broadcom Inc. announced production availability of the end-to-end NVMe over FC storage solution with NetApp, Inc. and SUSE LLC.

Emulex Gen 6 HBAs

NVMe over FC extends the natively parallel NVMe protocol to run on existing SAN infrastructure fabric while providing massive gains in application productivity and performance so customers can power new projects and get more done, faster.

Brocade Gen 6 switches

This is a milestone for the NVMe over Fabrics protocol, making FC the first enterprise transport to be in production with a complete solution consisting of Emulex Gen 6 HBAs, Brocade Gen 6 switches, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3, and NetApp’s AFF A800, A700, A700s and A300 AFAs running ONTAP 9.4. All of these components are in production and are available.

NetApp AFF systems

Advantages of NVMe over FC include:

• Highest performance: It delivers 50% more IO/s and 30% lower latency over a like SCSI solution on the AFF A700 NetApp array, as measured and validated by Demartek. (See Demartek report)

• Extends customer’s existing SAN infrastructure: with concurrent SCSI and NVMe over FC support.

• Purpose-built for storage: It is lossless and can handle the scalability requirements of next-generation applications including AI, machine learning and deep learning.

• Leverages secure platform: NVMe over FC remains the most secure network for mission-critical data.

Announcement also includes number of NVMe over FC achievements including:

• The company and NetApp are the first with a commercially available NVMe over FC Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK).

• The firm demonstrated a leadership role within the open source community by contributing the NVMe over Fabrics FC transport implementation to the Linux kernel. The company continues to serve as the Linux NVMe over Fabrics FC transport subsystem maintainer.

• The firm provided the industry a pre-standard implementation of NVMe Fabrics and the FC-NVMe protocol to facilitate and validate the FC-NVMe standard.

“Delivering the production availability of an end-to-end NVMe over FC solution required a deep technical engagement between Broadcom’s Emulex team, NetApp, SUSE, and Broadcom’s Brocade team. In working together, we have delivered a solution that extends the low latency and natively parallel NVMe protocol to the FC fabric, enabling datacenter customers a path to seamlessly modernize their storage network with blazing fast performance at scale,” said Jeff Hoogenboom, VP and GM, Emulex connectivity division, Broadcom.

“Delivering the industry’s first end-to-end NVMe over FC solution is a major technology milestone. The combination of NetApp flash with Gen 6 FC from Brocade and Emulex sets a new standard for enterprise storage that will drive massive gains in application productivity and performance,” said Jack Rondoni, SVP and GM, Brocade storage networking division, Broadcom.

“NVMe over FC is an excellent, and perhaps obvious, technology to adopt, especially for those who already have FC infrastructure. We saw significant performance improvements when using the new NVMe over FC protocol instead of traditional SCSI FCP with Gen 6 HBAs and switches from Broadcom, and NetApp AFAs including up to 58% improvement in IO/s and up to 34% lower latency,” said Dennis Martin, president, Demartek LLC.

“Broadcom and NetApp have worked together to provide an end-to-end NVMe powered solution that gives customers massive performance improvements, accelerating our customers’ critical applications. NetApp’s new A800 platform provides NVMe-attached solid state paired with the new ONTAP 9.4 release with NVMe over FC support for host connectivity. When paired with Broadcom’s Brocade Gen6 SAN switches and Emulex Gen 6 host bus adapters, the A800 delivers the end-to-end NVMe performance that customers are asking for to support new workloads including big data analytics, IoT, AI and deep learning,” said Octavian Tanase, SVP, ONTAP, NetApp.

“Working with the Linux community, Emulex has been a leader in NVMe over Fabrics and NVMe over FC, contributing the FC-NVMe transport and collaborating with SUSE and NetApp to deliver a truly enterprise storage solution. SUSE looks forward to delivering production support for NVMe over FC to all of the workloads that we support,” said Vojtech Pavlik, director, SUSE Labs.

Resource:
Netapp NVMe over FC for Dummies (registration required)