QLogic accelerates NVMe over fabrics adoption

NVMe over Fabrics enables NVMe storage devices to be shared, pooled and managed more effectively across a fabric. With support for 32GFC and 100Gbps Ethernet, the 2690 Enhanced Gen 5 and 2700 Series Gen 6 Fibre Channel, and FastLinQ 45000 series Ethernet adapters, provide streamlined access to low latency NVMe SSDs enabling scale out architectures, simplifying design, reducing overhead and improving performance.

Cavium has commenced an early access program for NVMe over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe) and NVMe over Universal RDMA (NVMe-oF) for select partners, with plans to expand the program in Q2’17.

Next-generation data intensive workloads are utilising low latency NVMe flash-based storage to meet ever increasing user demand. By combining the lossless, highly deterministic nature of Fibre Channel with NVMe, FC-NVMe delivers the performance, application response time, and scalability needed for next generation data centers, while leveraging existing Fibre Channel infrastructure.

Currently shipping QLogic 2690 Series of Enhanced Gen 5 and 2700 Series of Gen 6 Fibre Channel adapters are FC-NVMe ready and are being evaluated in FC-NVMe fabrics by multiple customers and partners across the industry.

Key benefits of QLogic FC-NVMe Solution are:

• Leading the standard: Cavium chairs the T11 committee defining the FC-NVMe specification. With broad support from industry, the specification achieved internal Letter Ballot status on December 8th, 2016, and is on track to become a ratified standard later this year.
• Industry’s Highest Performance: QLogic Fibre Channel adapters deliver the industry’s highest transactional performance of up to 2.6 Million IOPS, enabling the most demanding enterprise workloads that have the potential to leverage flash and NVMe. The QLogic 2700 series Gen 6 Fibre Channel adapter portfolio is the broadest in the industry with single, dual and quad port variants.
• Concurrent Operation and Investment Protection: With QLogic technology, FC-NVMe workloads can be seamlessly introduced into existing FCP-SCSI fabrics. With QLogic 2690 and 2700 Series FC HBAs, FCP-SCSI and FC-NVMe protocol traffic can run concurrently without requiring any rip and replace of existing infrastructure.
• Advanced SAN Fabric Management– QLogic StorFusion technology delivers a full suite of diagnostics, rapid provisioning and QoS services throughout the fabric which automate and simplify SAN deployment and orchestration.
• Software Defined Storage – Cavium is driving innovation in software defined storage platforms with target mode drivers for the Storage Performance Developer Kit (SPDK) project, which provides a high performance user-space device implementation under the BSD license.

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 exceptional low latency and offload capabilities will become a popular choice for NVMe over Fabrics. Cavium FastLinQ 45000 Series 10/25/40/50/100GbE Ethernet adapters support

Universal RDMA (RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP) and deliver the ultimate choice to customers for scaling out NVMe over a general-purpose Ethernet fabric.

Key benefits of Cavium FastLinQ NVMe over Ethernet RDMA Solution are:

• Broad Spectrum of Ethernet connectivity speeds – 10/25/40/50/100GbE to host the most demanding enterprise, telco and cloud applications and deliver scalability to drive business growth, available in cost optimised standard, blade and OCP form factors.
• Universal RDMA – Industry’s only network adapter that delivers customers technology choice and investment protection with support for concurrent RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP for NVMe over Fabrics.
• Server Virtualisation – Optimise infrastructure costs and increase virtual machine density by leveraging in-built technologies like SR-IOV and Network Partitioning (NPAR) that deliver acceleration and QoS for virtual workloads and infrastructure traffic.
• Standards Compliant: Cavium NVMe over Ethernet RDMA solutions are compliant with the currently released version of the NVMe over RDMA Fabrics specification.

Cavium 45000 Series 10/25/40/50/100GbE, QLogic 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 16GFC and 2700 Series Gen 6 32GFC adapters are available from Cavium and multiple leading OEMs and ODMs.