Mellanox Technologies a supplier of interconnect solutions for servers and storage systems, has announced that its end-to-end 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet interconnect solutions support the recently announced IBTA RoCEv2 specification. The RoCEv2 standard enables routing RDMA traffic across Layer 3 Ethernet networks to address the needs of today’s evolving hyperscale Web 2.0 and cloud deployments. Mellanox supports RoCEv2 in the company’s performance-leading line of 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet ConnectX-3 Pro NICs and SwitchX-2 switch systems, with driver support for both Windows and Linux available now.
“RoCEv2 allows us to better scale our cloud deployment in a manner that is compatible with our evolving software defined networking infrastructure and growing virtualization demands, while achieving significant performance and efficiency benefits from RDMA,” said Albert Greenberg, partner development manager for Azure Networking at Microsoft. “Utilizing 40 Gigabit Ethernet solutions with RoCEv2 support is a key factor in enabling Microsoft Azure to efficiently, reliably and cost-effectively process the massive amounts of data required to support our customers’ wide-range of workloads.”
“Major Web 2.0 and cloud providers are adopting a converged infrastructure and scale out storage to cope with massive scale, virtualization, mobility challenges and the explosion of unstructured data. RoCEv2 finally brings together all the necessary ingredients to make network convergence over Ethernet a reality,” said Michael Kagan, CTO, Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox’s 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet solutions with RoCEv2 support will enable Web 2.0 and cloud providers to dramatically improve performance and efficiency of their server and storage infrastructures while reducing total cost of ownership.”
According to Mellanox, the RDMA technology at the heart of RoCE delivers unmatched block, object and file-based storage performance. Microsoft’s SMB Direct protocol supports file-based applications with RDMA in both virtualized and bare metal environments. Microsoft has demonstrated 10X faster Live Migration and 4X SQL-Server performance improvements using SMB Direct over RoCE storage interconnects. In addition, Big Data workloads such as Hadoop can achieve up to 2X performance improvements using RoCE-based, RDMA-enabled file systems like HDFS, GPFS, and soon Ceph.
