Storage Technology Advancements Enable Fibre Channel and Ethernet solutions for NVMe over Fabrics

SAN JOSE, Calif., May 9, 2017 — (PRNewswire) —  Today, Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise and cloud data centers, announced that its family of QLogic® Gen 6 Fibre Channel and FastLinQ® Ethernet adapters will support NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) technology, enabling the scale out of flash storage platforms.

NVMe-oF defines an efficient mechanism to utilize NVMe devices in large scale storage deployments and provides investment protection by leveraging the latest innovations and advances in low latency SSD flash to be realized over proven Fibre Channel and Ethernet RDMA fabrics.  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.

Cavium QLogic NVMe over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe) Solution

Next-generation data intensive workloads are utilizing 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.

Cavium 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 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 optimized 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 Virtualization – Optimize 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.

To get access to the Cavium QLogic NVMe-oF Evaluation Kit and for more information, visit  www.qlogic.com/nvmeof

Supporting Quotes:

"NVMe over Fabric technologies are unlocking the value of data by delivering a low latency, scalable, secure and proven fabric to extended the reach of NVMe across a large scale fabric," said Raghib Hussain, Chief Operating Officer, Cavium. "Cavium QLogic Fibre Channel and FastLinQ Ethernet Universal RDMA solutions for NVMe deliver the ultimate choice to customers looking to bring the performance and economics of NVMe to enterprise and cloud datacenters."

"Fibre Channel is a reliable, secure, widely accepted and proven transport in storage area networks that comprise the heart of enterprise datacenters and an obvious choice for NVMe over Fabrics," said Craig Carlson, Chairman of the FC-NVMe Standards Committee. "As the chair of the committee defining the FC-NVMe standard, Cavium and the broader ecosystem is committed to bringing all the benefits of Fibre Channel (FCP-SCSI) to FC-NVMe."

"Brocade and Cavium QLogic Fibre Channel solutions have been an integral part of every wave of storage innovation in the data center," said Jack Rondoni, senior vice president of storage networking, Brocade. "NVMe is the next disruptive technology on the horizon that will require a modern Fibre Channel SAN to unleash the full potential of next-generation flash solutions. Today, Brocade and Cavium QLogic can deliver NVMe over Fibre Channel networks that will enable our shared customers to drive unprecedented low-latency performance with their existing Gen 5 and Gen 6 Fibre Channel SAN investments."

"FC-NVMe extends the reach of billions of dollars of existing Fibre Channel investments," said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. "With the ability to concurrently manage both FCP-SCSI and FC-NVMe fabrics, we expect the popularity of Fibre Channel connected flash-based storage to grow strongly as next generation storage designs incorporate NVMe."

"NVMe Over Fabrics will radically change Storage and Networking paradigms in next generation data center and cloud architectures," said Vince Asbridge, president, SANBlaze Technology, Inc. "Close collaboration with QLogic on both Fibre Chanel and Ethernet RDMA Fabrics for scaling out NVMe has led to the development of the SANBlaze NVMe Emulator."

"Most clouds and data centers today run on Ubuntu, the leading Cloud OS. Canonical is pleased to partner with Cavium to announce NVMe-oF support on Ubuntu 17.04 to supply the industry's high performing and low-latency storage networks needed for today's data centric applications," said John Zannos, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Platform and Business Development.

About Cavium
Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), offers a broad portfolio of infrastructure solutions for compute, security, storage, switching, connectivity and baseband processing. Cavium's highly integrated multi-core SoC products deliver software compatible solutions across low to high performance points enabling secure and intelligent functionality in Enterprise, Datacenter and Service Provider Equipment. Cavium processors and solutions are supported by an extensive ecosystem of operating systems, tools, application stacks, hardware reference designs and other products. Cavium is headquartered in San Jose, CA with design centers in California, Massachusetts, India, Israel, China and Taiwan.

 

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