Today Mellanox rolled out new BlueField-based storage controllers, offering “ultra-high performance” for Ethernet Storage Fabrics.
Storage, server, and cloud customers are telling us they need faster, more efficient ways to network and virtualize NVMe flash,” said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “These BlueField storage controllers tightly-integrate flash connectivity, networking, and Arm processors to maximize performance and efficiency, while eliminating the need for a separate CPU in storage and hyperconverged appliances. This makes them perfect for connecting and virtualizing the fastest non-volatile storage.”
The BlueField BF1600 and BF1700 storage controllers deliver over 4 million IOPS with NVMe-oF, up to 200Gb/s of network and PCIe bandwidth, and network ports configurable as either Ethernet or InfiniBand. They provide leading performance for NVMe over RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet), InfiniBand, and TCP/IP, and include smart offloads for storage including NVMe-oF, erasure coding, and T10-DIF data integrity signatures. The BlueField SoC integrates the award winning ConnectX-5 network adapter with sixteen 64-bit Arm cores to create a fully-programmable environment for storage software such as compression, encryption, RAID, and virtualization.
The new BlueField storage controllers improve the performance and efficiency and extend the capabilities of Ethernet Storage Fabrics. In addition they fully support advanced InfiniBand-based storage solutions.
E8 Storage delivers revolutionary, shared NVMe storage solutions via our patented software running on top of Mellanox Ethernet Storage Fabric technology,” said Ziv Serlin, VP of Architecture and Co-Founder at E8 Storage. “We are excited to be working with Mellanox to incorporate the integrated networking and Arm CPU capabilities in BlueField SmartNICs into our solutions, providing greater performance and efficiency to our customers.”
BlueField storage controller cards are sampling today with fully qualified solutions expected in Q4. The cards are being integrated into storage systems by multiple original equipment manufacturers and original design manufacturers. All BlueField storage controllers, SmartNICs, and development systems include the ability to accelerate NVMe-oF.
NVMe over Fabrics continues to be one of the hottest storage topics amongst both customers and vendors,” said George Crump, lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. “Some NVMe-oF solutions use centralized flash arrays and others use a hyperconverged model, but both models can benefit from a Storage Controller that can support 200 Gb/s of network throughput with programmability and hardware offloads. The Mellanox BlueField storage controllers are extremely well-positioned to network the ongoing flash storage revolution.”
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