Mellanox’s Integrated Networking Solutions to Boost NVMe Over Fabrics

SANTA CLARA, CA: Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage, announces the launch of a family of end-to-end networking solutions and software for connecting solid-state storage to the fabric. The family of programmable processors, including Mellanox ConnectX-4 adapter, ConnectX-5 adapter and BlueFiel supports smart offloads and connect solid state drives (SSDs) directly to the network. This simplifies system design and reduces power and storage system costs.

The family of processors is being used for NVMe Over Fabrics to remove the storage system processor from the data path, enabling Flash-based storage platformsto connect more NVMe without adding on to the cost of CPU. BlueField combines Mellanox ConnectX-5 network acceleration, RDMA and NVMe over Fabrics offloads, PCIe Gen4 switch, with a range of high-performance 64-bit ARMv8 cores in a compact and proficient System on Chip (SoC), making it the ideal networked storage controller for solid state Flash arrays, reducing the expense of PCI Express switches in each SSD enclosure and connecting flash devices directly to the network for storage access.

“We’ve seen the rapid evolution of SSDs and have been contributing to the NVMe over Fabrics standard and community drivers,” says Michael Kagan, CTO at Mellanox Technologies. “Because faster storage requires faster networks, we designed the highest-speeds and most intelligent offloads into both our ConnectX-5 and BlueField families. This lets us connect many SSDs directly to the network at full speed, without the need to dedicate many CPU cores to managing data movement, and we provide a complete end-to-end networking solution with the highest-performing 25, 50, and 100GbE switches and cables as well.”