Flash Memory Summit: Cavium Showcased Range of NVMe over Fabric Solutions

At Flash Memory Summit, Cavium, Inc. showcased a range of NVMe over Fabric solutions including FC-NVMe on Gen 6 FC and NVMe over Fabrics concurrently over RoCE and iWARP on FastlinQ 45000/41000 Series Ethernet NICs.

QLogic 2700 Series
Gen 6 Fibre (32Gb) Channel adapters

The NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) specification is an emerging technology that gives data center networks unprecedented access to NVMe SSD storage. It delivers efficient scaling of NVMe-based SSDs over data center fabrics including Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networks (iWARP and RoCE), as well as, FC. This enables faster, more scalable connections between servers and storage as well as between storage controllers and NVMe enclosures.

The company is leading the transition to NVMe over Fabrics by enabling a range of performance solutions that seamlessly transition customer infrastructure and applications from legacy storage to current and next-generation flash/NVMe, and is the only solution supplier offering both NVMe-oF over Universal RDMA and FC Adapters.

QLogic FastLinQ QL45611HLCU
100GbE-to-PCIe 3.0 intelligent Ethernet adapter

Company’s participation in Flash Memory Summit spans multiple live performance and interop demonstrations, speaking sessions by experts and product showcases.

Key demonstrations and engagements included:

Demo: Breakthrough performance from an end-to-end FC-NVMe solution with QLogic Gen 6 FC delivering more than two million NVMe IO/s on the SPDK-based software-defined storage framework
Demo: Industry’s [1] solution that delivers technology choice and investment protection to customers with concurrent RoCE and iWARP transports for NVMe over Fabrics
Demo: Concurrent FCP and FC-NVMe end-to-end multi-vendor interoperability demonstration featuring QLogic Gen 6 FC
Breakout session: Accelerate Access to Networked Flash with FC-NVMe
Expert panel: Ultra-Fast NVMe Storage Networks for Next Generation Flash Array
Expert panel: NVMe over Fabrics Does Networking Part 2b

QLogic NVMe over FC (FC-NVMe) solution
Next-generation data intensive workloads utilize low latency NVMe flash-based storage to meet increasing user demand. By combining the lossless, highly deterministic nature of FC with NVMe, FC-NVMe delivers the performance, application response time, and scalability needed for next generation data centers, while leveraging existing FC infrastructure. Currently shipping QLogic 2690 Series of Enhanced Gen 5 and 2700 Series of Gen 6 FC adapters are FC-NVMe ready and are being evaluated in FC-NVMe fabrics by customers and partners.

FastLinQ NVMe over Ethernet universal RDMA (NVMe-oF) solution
Driven by the performance demands of NVMe, high-performance, low latency networking is a fundamental requirement for a fabric to scale out. Ethernet-based RDMA fabrics with their low latency and offload capabilities will become a choice for NVMe over Fabrics. Firm’s FastLinQ 45000/41000 Series Ethernet NICs support Universal RDMA (RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP concurrently) and deliver the choice to customers for scaling out NVMe over a general purpose Ethernet fabric.

FastLinQ 40000 Series 10/25/40/50/100GbE, QLogic 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 16GFC and 2700 Series Gen 6 32GFC adapters are available from the company and multiple OEMs and ODMs.

^[1]Unviversal RDMA

Ressources:
FC-NVMe White Paper
NVMe Direct White Paper
Fibre Channel Adapters
Intelligent Ethernet Adapters