Toshiba to Demo NVMe Over Fabrics at SC17

Today Toshiba Memory America announced plans to demonstrate High Performance Computing NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) at SC17 in Denver.

NVMe-oF brings direct-connect NVMe SSD performance to the storage fabric with the flexibility of disaggregated storage. It provides scale-out, cloud data centers with software-defined, NVMe-oF storage that centralizes and virtualizes NVMe SSDs across the network, making them highly available to compute nodes at near direct-attached storage (DAS) performance.

“NVMe-oF enables new levels of storage performance and flexibility for HPC and cloud data centers,” said Steve Fingerhut, senior vice president and general manager, SSD and Cloud Software Business Units at Toshiba Memory America, Inc. “Toshiba’s software provides a critical building block for data centers to realize the potential of NVMe-oF. Our software delivers an NVMe target engine that enables compute nodes to efficiently use the very high performance and storage capacities of NVMe SSDs.”

The demonstration features Newisys’ next-generation NVMe-oF hardware platform, the NSS1160G-2N, an evolution of their recent, award-winning NVMe-oF storage system design. It is a 1U storage system with dual-node and dual-socket Intel® Xeon®2 processors and supports up to 4x 100Gb/s Ethernet network interface cards (NICs). Each node has eight (8) Toshiba NVMe U.2 SSDs3 (16 NVMe drives per system) directly connected to the CPU, minimizing latency.

Toshiba is making the demo possible with its target engine software to provide storage virtualization and SSD/flash management, which is critical to fully realize the promise of NVMe-oF connectivity. With an NVMe-oF standardized protocol, Toshiba’s storage node software delivers the full performance of NVMe SSDs to compute nodes for HPC dataset load and unload times by delivering the bandwidth of direct-attached NVMe SSDs with inherent network efficiencies.

Other key features of Toshiba’s NVMe target engine are:

  • Abstraction, total virtualization and high availability of NVMe-based flash storage
  • Provisioning of storage and namespaces to compute nodes and virtual machines
  • REST API (application programming interface) to connect to popular orchestration frameworks

Sanmina customers rely on us to deliver innovation to them,” said Eugene McCabe, EVP Enterprise Computing & Storage at Sanmina Corporation. “Our collaboration with Toshiba demonstrates our commitment to innovation by proving new technologies, like NVMe-oF, in a real-world application environment.”

The NVMe-oF demonstration will be showcased in the Sanmina booth #237 at SC17.

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