MiTAC Selecting Mellanox BlueField System-on-Chip

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation has selected its BlueField system-on-chip (SoC) for their new generation MiTAC HillTop NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) JBOF (Just A Bunch of Flash) storage platforms.

Accommodating up to 24 hot-swappable NVMe SSDs, MiTAC’s JBOF platform provides a storage capacity of up to 156TB in a 2U rack space. In addition, the integration of two BlueField SoCs enables MiTAC’s platform to support direct connectivity with up to four 100GbE and IB ports, making it a flexible and performing storage platform, answering to the demanding needs of data centers.

The BlueField dual-port 100GbE and IB SoC combines the industry ConnectX-5 network controller, with a 16 core Arm A72 CPU, DDR4 memory subsystems, and a PCIe switch with 32 PCIe Gen3/4 lanes. BlueField has demonstrated NVMe-oF performance of 7.5 million IO/s, with zero CPU utilization and under 3 microseconds of NVMe-oF latency.

“Faster, smaller, and more efficient storage is at the core of data center needs today,” said Simon Hwang, business VP of enterprise business unit, MiTAC, “which is why we selected Mellanox BlueField for our latest generation HillTop JBOF platform. BlueField stands up to the promise of NVMe technology, offering the best possible latency and IO/s for optimized storage performance. Customers planning to deploy powerful NVMe-oF solutions will be able to leverage HillTop’s flexible flash storage platforms to meet their exact deployment needs.“

“Enterprises need storage platforms capable of maximum I/O to deliver extreme performance, density and scalability with power and cost efficiency,” said Eric Kuo, R&D VP of enterprise business unit, MiTAC. “NVMe is fast becoming a market leading technology. MiTAC’s HillTop NVMe high density storage platform, powered by the Mellanox BlueField SoC, turns this technology into a complete solution for our data center customers, and the programmability of BlueField allows HillTop to run storage software such as deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, and encryption.“

“We are excited to be at the core of MiTAC’s new generation of all-flash array platforms,” said Yael Shenhav, VP of products, Mellanox. “The BlueField family of system-on-chip solutions integrates a compelling feature set and hardware accelerations with all the essential elements required to build efficient NVMe-oF JBOFs without the need for a separate CPU, simplifying design and helping maximize high-performance storage resource utilization. BlueField’s NVMe-oF advanced hardware acceleration offloads unleash performance with near-zero CPU utilization, improving data center operators’ TCO.“

MiTAC HillTop NVMe Storage Platforms will be available later this year.