Joint Demonstration with Marvell at FMS 2018 Highlights Growing Ecosystem Support for NVMe-oF

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — August 6, 2018 — Toshiba Memory America, Inc., the U.S.-based subsidiary of Toshiba Memory Corporation, today announced that its KumoScale™¹ shared accelerated storage software has successfully tested NVMe-oF™² (NVM Express™ over Fabrics) TCP acceleration with Marvell^® FastLinQ^®3 100GbE NICs.

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First introduced earlier this year, Toshiba’s KumoScale software enables the use of NVMe-oF to make flash storage accessible over a data center network. KumoScale provides a simple, flexible abstraction of physical disks into a pool of block storage, all while preserving the high performance of direct-attached NVMe™ SSDs. While the benefits of NVMe-oF are well known, cloud adoption can be impeded by the expense and complexity of the high-performance, low latency networking needed to deploy it. NVMe-oF on TCP enables an unprecedented price/performance balance.

TCP, the most widely-used networking protocol in today’s data centers, has not been a true option to transport NVMe-oF – until now. By leveraging the trusted TCP protocol, KumoScale enables NVMe-oF to be deployed over existing Ethernet networks and opens the door for the broader deployment of NVMe-oF networks and clouds.

“Private or hybrid cloud deployments are becoming increasingly popular for scale-out database applications in dynamic containerized environments,” noted Eric Burgener, research vice president for storage in the Enterprise Platforms, Storage & Network Infrastructure Group for IDC. “Solutions like Toshiba’s KumoScale which use TCP as a transport give customers an NVMe over Fabric option that requires no custom hardware or software on the server side, making this higher performance host connection available to any and all servers without additional cost.”

By delivering disaggregated, highly-flexible network block storage to NVMe-oF compute nodes using standard TCP transport protocols, KumoScale allows data center applications to run more efficiently. Latency improvements over other fabrics, including FCoE and iSCSI, are also realized – on existing networks.

According to Jeremy Werner, vice president of SSD marketing and product planning at Toshiba Memory America, Inc., “When it comes to making cloud deployments more agile and cost effective, disaggregated flash storage connected with NVMe-oF is changing the game by optimizing the use of compute and storage resources. In addition, with KumoScale and NVMe-oF over TCP, high-performance shared flash storage can be deployed on existing cloud infrastructure to enable a rapid, low-cost rollout.”

A leading provider of NVMe SSDs, technology and software, Toshiba Memory is committed to helping cloud data center customers maximize flash and compute resources. With the NVMe organization actively working on a binding specification for NVMe-oF over TCP, the company is poised and ready for the upcoming certification process.

Toshiba Memory and Marvell will jointly demonstrate KumoScale with TCP acceleration at Flash Memory Summit booth #307 (Hall A) in the Santa Clara Convention Center from August 7-9. Marvell’s FastLinQ Ethernet solution includes a TCP Offload Engine, which optimizes throughput by offloading processing of the TCP stack to the network controller.

“NVMe-oF technology is rapidly changing the way cloud and enterprise data centers connect to shared storage,” said Rajneesh Gaur, senior vice president and general manager of the Server Connectivity Business Unit at Marvell. “I am excited about our technology collaboration with Toshiba to enable the new and unique TCP transport option for KumoScale. Marvell FastLinQ 10/25/50/100GbE NICs is currently the industry’s only solution with concurrent NVMe-oF offload for TCP, RoCE and iWARP, and provides compelling flexibility, scale and performance while reducing time-to-market and time-to-revenue for our joint customers.”

For more information, please visit storage.toshiba.com/kumoscale.

Notes:

1: KumoScale is a trademark of Toshiba Memory Corporation.

2: NVMe, NVM Express, and NVMe-oF are trademarks of NVM Express, Inc.

3: Marvell is a registered trademark of Marvell International Ltd. FastLinQ is a registered trademark of QLogic Corporation, a Marvell Technology Group Ltd. company.

All other company names, product names, and service names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

About Toshiba Memory America, Inc.

Toshiba Memory America, Inc. is the U.S.-based subsidiary of Toshiba Memory Corporation, a leading worldwide supplier of flash memory and solid state drives (SSDs). From the invention of flash memory to today’s breakthrough 96-layer BiCS FLASH™ 3D technology, Toshiba continues to lead innovation and move the industry forward. For more information on Toshiba Memory, please visit  business.toshiba-memory.com and follow the company on LinkedIn, Twitter ( @Toshiba_Memory) and Facebook .