Computex: AIC Partners With Exten Technologies for NVMe-oF Target Solution

AIC, Inc. and Exten Technologies, Inc. have partnered to provide a complete NVMe-oF target solution using a cost-effective FBOF platform running Broadcom, Inc.‘s PS1100R Stingray 100G SmartNIC with Exten HyperDynamic software.

J2024-04 supports 24 hot-swappable, dual-ported NVMe drives

The AIC J2024-04 platform supports twice the PCIe bandwidth of a 2U server, allowing quad 100GbE networking with 24 NVMe drives. HyperDynamic storage software provides performance with management, provisioning, and RAID data protection services.

“NVMe-oF will reshape the datacenter landscape. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a driver in these changes. AIC is proud to be one of the leading solution providers to offer a turnkey box to the leading data centers in the world,” said Michael Liang, CEO, AIC.

“Modern applications require modern storage,” said Craig Gilmore, CEO, Exten. “We are excited to enable ultra-high-performance resilient storage that meets the needs of the most demanding applications, and at a price point below that of traditional storage solutions.“

“Data center and enterprise storage is undergoing a quantum change as scale out applications drive requirements towards disaggregated storage solutions,” said Dan Harding, VP, compute and connectivity division, Broadcom. “Having production ready platforms like the AIC and EXTEN solution based on our Stingray 100G SmartNIC will enable rapid time to deployment.“

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This platform benefits from Exten’s native understanding of dual-ported drives and controller failover. Utilizing standard MPIO and Linux drivers, this solution provides a storage platform with fault tolerance at both the controller and drive level.

This software uses open-standards drivers and management frameworks to provide complete management of NVMe-oF clusters. This open standards based approach ensures there is no vendor lock-in.

Storage disaggregation
The company’s FBOF, with HyperDynamic software installed, provides highly-available, serviceable, storage that is disaggregated from compute resources. This arrangement allows storage and compute to scale independently with no performance sacrifice. HyperDynamic storage software allows datacenter architects to select multiple hardware platforms and fabrics while maintaining a consistent user experience and high datapath performance.

HyperDynamic storage features:

Standards-based datacenters – the software is built on open standards, including NVMe-oF and a Redfish and Swordfish-compliant RESTful API that provides flexible storage provisioning with diverse interop among vendors.
Software-defined NVMe-oF provides the ability to choose the hardware components and fabric appropriate for the task. EXTEN supports both RDMA and TCP in parallel for flexibility.
HyperDynamic Datapath ensures no IOP is left behind – Share the storage capacity and bandwidth of the FBOF among multiple, standards-compliant initiators with no impact on performance.
Data services – the software supports NVMe hot-plugging and drive-level redundancy with RAID for the AIC FBOF’s 24 hot-swappable, dual-ported drives.

J2024 FBOF – Engineered as a storage platform, the J2024-04 supports 24 hot-swappable, dual-ported NVMe drives and is managed by 4 hot-pluggable PS1100R Stingray controller cards. This combination provides 64 PCIe lanes for networking and an additional 64 for storage, maintaining nearly 40GB/s of RW performance. By utilizing PS1100R Stingray controller cards, the FBOF provides a performance-to-cost ratio.
Performance up to six times faster than SATA SSD, three times faster than 12Gb SAS SSD
Designed for low-latency and high-performance applications
PCIe interface to support NVMe over Fabrics (3rd party cards)

The company will be exhibiting at Computex 2019 held at Taipei, Taiwan, from May 28 to June 1, 2019.

J2024-04 specifications
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