FMS: Solarflare Demonstrated Benefits of NVMe over TCP Storage Fabrics

At the Flash Memory Summit, Solarflare Communications, Inc., Intel Corp., Super Micro Computer, Inc., Smart IO/s, Inc. and Exten Technologies, Inc. demonstrated the benefits of NVMe over TCP storage fabrics without compromise.

NVMe over TCP storage fabrics deliver the same performance, usability and streamlined deployment benefits associated with more complicated proprietary networks, but at a lower cost.

In the past, network latency was rarely an issue because disk drives were typically the source of performance bottlenecks. However, as storage media has migrated from disk to flash, networks have become the bottleneck. Applications harnessing hundreds-to-thousands of servers in the data center are constantly accessing random bits of data distributed across these servers.

Commodity, high-performance NVMe over TCP storage fabrics solve this network bottleneck problem with acceleration services running over streamlined Ethernet networks. By leveraging the native Ethernet TCP transport ubiquitous in every data center, NVMe over TCP eliminates the need for proprietary Ethernet extensions, and is equivalent to any other technology to date.

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“Cloud and enterprise data centers are looking forward to cost-effective, low-latency NVMe storage fabrics to scale-out flash without performance degradation,” said Ahmet Houssein, VP, marketing and strategic development, Solarflare. “NVMe over TCP technology is an industry game changer, allowing customers to efficiently overlay a storage fabric onto their existing network that performs within 10% of locally connected high performance flash storage.“

XtremeScale X2541 10/25/40/50/100GbE single port

At Flash Memory Summit, Solarflare and Intel will demonstrate Intel’s memory media line of SSDs – Optane, a low-latency storage over TCP, with Solarflare’s approach to NVMe over TCP. The combination provides customers with access to remote data faster. The two companies illustrated how to achieve disaggregated access end-to-end latency as low as 15 microseconds, utilizing Solarflare’s XtremeScale network adapter and software.

In addition, Solarflare, Supermicro, Smart IO/s and Exten demonstrated all-flash software-defined storage servers and NVMe over TCP fabrics that represent the future of cost-effective, performance networked storage.

XtremeScale X2522 10/25GbE dual port

XtremeScale X2 NICs
For modern data centers, XtremeScale X2 NICs lay a foundation for NIC-based network virtualization needed by distributed applications with inter-connected cloud services, machine learning, and big data workloads. The firm’s X2 NIC is the first NIC platform that can establish ultra-scale connectivity to thousands of virtual networks, while at the same time provide real-time packet and flow information. This foundation of high bandwidth, low latency, scale connectivity and packet telemetry allows X2 NICs to serve as a commercial platform for micro-segmented acceleration, security and visibility providing NIC fabric services that scale with each server, VM or container.

The NVMe over TCP specification is expected to be standardized within the second half of 2018.

Every XtremeScale adapter and software will be backward compliant to the specification at no additional cost.

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Flash Memory Summit: Solarflare Demos Storage Fabric Staying True to Ethernet: NVMe Over TCP
With Samsung Semiconductor and Super Micro Computer
2017.08.15 | Press Release