Solarflare Leads Way in Making Flash Drive Networking Simple and Scalable

Solarflare Communications, Inc. congratulates the NVM Express, Inc. standards organization for ratifying the NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) Transport Binding specification; paving the way for broad deployment of disaggregated NVMe flash storage solutions over Ethernet networks.

In the past, conventional wisdom dictated that low-latency networks required extensions to the Ethernet protocol. This industry-standard validates the company’s pioneering development of high-bandwidth/low latency networking over standard TCP.

The NVMe/TCP standard also blasts open access to performance networked flash storage.

Scale-out flash fabrics can be deployed and provide microsecond access to information on any server in a data center with an Ethernet port, and at a lower cost than more complicated proprietary networks.

“The demand for low-latency high-performance networked storage continues to accelerate with the deployment of data-intensive AI and ML workloads. 100GbE is in its fast growth phase, with port shipments expected to be almost 2x for 2018 over 2017. 400GbE is starting to ship in 2019 and expected to be near two million ports shipped in 2022. This makes Ethernet a prime candidate for carrying storage traffic,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., senior research director and advisor, cloud and data center research practice, IHS Markit. “Having a ratified standard for NVMe over TCP, which is already in wide use in the data center, opens the door to increased adoption of flash storage fabrics.“

“Ratification of this standard is a watershed for high performance storage networking over TCP,” said Tom Spencer, senior director, product marketing, Solarflare. “Today, over 90% of all ports on data center servers are using TCP transport, and therefore primed for plug-and-play NVMe over TCP storage fabrics, reducing both CapEx and OpEx.“

Industry support for NVMe/TCP storage fabrics
“NVMe/TCP is a next step in the evolution of data center NVMe storage. The NVMe/TCP specification will make the next step a big one by paving the way for easy implementation of NVMe storage fabrics in the installed base of Ethernet networks,” said Greg Matson, director, datacenter strategic planning and marketing, non-volatile memory solutions group, Intel Corp.

“TCP support will accelerate the adoption of NVMe-oF and help it become mainstream within data centers,” said Joel Dedrick, VP and GM, NVMe over Fabrics storage, Toshiba Memory America, Inc. “Cloud deployments can now optimize the ratio of flash and compute resources through a disaggregated architecture utilizing NVMe over TCP and our KumoScale shared accelerated storage software.“

“Enabling TCP fabrics is an important component in realizing NVMe’s potential. Exten HyperDynamic storage software delivers a high-performance NVMe over TCP solution with a complete standards based management framework,” said Craig Gilmore, CEO, Exten Technologies. “Exten software enables data centers to disaggregate storage while utilizing existing network infrastructure with the performance of DAS.“

“NVMe/TCP has paved the way for a new class of low latency and high performance storage appliances that benefit from ubiquitous TCP infrastructure,” said Ashutosh Das, president and CEO, Smart IO/s, Inc. “We are excited to be at the forefront of the newly standardized NVMe/TCP technology.“

Download the NVMe/TCP Transport Binding specification.

Solarflare: History of TCP networking innovation
Ten years ago, the company developed the first networking solutions for high-frequency trading (HFT) based on native TCP running in the lightning-fast user space of main memory. Today, the company is the market share leader in server connectivity for HFT with hardened TCP-based networking technology that out-performs RDMA-based solutions. Every day, in nine of the top 10 exchanges around the world, Solarflare Onload acceleration technology powers billions of trades at nanosecond speed. The same Onload technology used for HFT enables Solarflare to turbo-charge NVMe over TCP storage fabrics and someday make nanosecond storage access times the new normal.