At Marvell, Qlogic FC and FastLinQ Ethernet Adapter Solutions Enable NVMe-oF Technology in vSphere 7.0

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. announced that its Qlogic FC and FastLinQ Ethernet adapter solutions enable NVMe-oF technology in vSphere 7.0.

 Qlogic Qle2690 and Qle2692 FC adapters

As data growth continues to skyrocket, data centers are grappling with increasing power consumption, complexity and cost associated with the demand for greater storage bandwidth and capacity.

The integration of the company’s FC and Ethernet adapters into vSphere 7.0 allows low-latency, performance NVMe flash storage to be effectively shared, pooled and managed across a fabric resulting in cost-efficient enterprise and hybrid cloud data center scale-out architectures.

In enterprise and multi-tenant containerized data center environments, users of vSphere 7.0 can benefit from the firm’s technology by leveraging the latest advances in performance flash storage to be realized over proven FC (FC-NVMe) and Ethernet RDMA (NVMe/RDMA) fabrics.

QLogic 269x 16GFC and 2700 32GFC Series HBAs provide low latency, deterministic and concurrent FCP and FC-NVMe storage access. The 2770 Series HBAs deliver 50% more IO/s, security backed by silicon root of trust and VM telemetry powered by StorFusion VM-ID technology. This feature set enables performance-centric and latency-sensitive applications to securely scale on a virtualization-aware SAN.

Fastlinq 41000 Ethernet controller

The FastLinQ 41000 and 45000 Series Ethernet adapters support NVMe/RDMA over both RoCEv2 and iWARP protocols. Starting with vSphere 7.0, customers can leverage NVMe/RoCEv2 capabilities of FastLinQ NICs while future-proofing their data centers for potential use cases of NVMe/iWARP and NVMe/TCP. FastLinQ Universal RDMA capability, combined with future support for NVMe over TCP, provides IT managers with a broad choice of options to scale out NVMe.

This announcement also marks continued momentum in accelerating the company’s vision for end-to-end Ethernet storage, specifically the Ethernet Bunch of flash (EBOF) architecture for optimal disaggregated performance flash storage. By deploying vSphere 7.0, data center operators can use the firm’s FastLinQ adapters to power EBOF architecture comprised of NVMe-oF Ethernet SSD converter controllers, SSD controllers and Prestera Ethernet switches. Edge-to-cloud data centers can achieve greater performance and lower TCO utilizing this scalable architecture.

“Data center modernization strategies are moving toward a shared infrastructure, disaggregation of resources, and dynamic provisioning of storage to provide the right amount of storage and performance based on workload and SLAs,” said Seamus Crehan, president and founder, Crehan Research Inc. “This announcement around NVMe-oF for vSphere can help solve a significant portion of the IT resource disaggregation challenge, enabling business efficiency and investment protection.“

“NVMe-oF technologies are unlocking the value of NVMe flash by delivering a variety of low latency, scalable and trusted fabrics,” said Vikram Karvat, VP and GM, server connectivity business unit, Marvell. “The introduction of Marvell’s QLogic FC-NVMe and FastLinQ NVMe/RoCEv2 technologies into industry-leading virtualization platforms from VMware enables end users to leverage economies of scale when deploying NVMe without compromising the performance, reliability or manageability of their infrastructure.“

“VMware and Marvell solutions have been an integral part of every wave of virtualization and storage innovation in the data center for several years,” said Sudhanshu Jain, director, product management, cloud platform, VMware, Inc. “Marvell’s QLogic FC and FastLinQ Ethernet technology with vSphere 7.0 enables customers to leverage existing SAN infrastructure and migrate to FC-NVMe to take advantage of performance and cost matrix.“

The FastLinQ 41000/45000 Series NICs, QLogic 269X and 2700 Series 16/32G FC HBAs are available from the company and multiple server and storage system OEMs and ODMs worldwide. Customers can download the latest software that enables NVMe/RoCEv2 and FC-NVMe on vSphere 7.0 at the company’s website.

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October 15, 2019 | Press Release