Mellanox Collaborates With Microsoft and Micron
Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions, announced today its collaboration with Microsoft Corp. and Micron to build the first-ever cloud solution connected by 100Gb/s Ethernet with the Mellanox CloudX platform. The solution utilizes Microsoft's next-generation Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct technology, Micron's M500DC 800GB 2.5 SSDs, NVMe SSD technology, and DRAM connected by Mellanox's end-to-end interconnect solution that includes ConnectX-4 100Gb/s RoCE I/O adapters and LinkX 100Gb/s copper cables. Preliminary performance benchmarks showed that running Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces over RoCE enables 2X higher bandwidth, 50 percent less latency and more than 33 percent less CPU utilization compared to running over TCP/IP.
Storage Spaces enables continuously available storage clusters to use local storage, unlocking new high-performance NVME SSDs and low-cost SATA SSDs and eliminates the old requirement for shared storage enclosures. The high-performance SMB Direct protocol is used for inter-node communication over the Storage Spaces Direct software storage bus.
"CloudX platforms enable building the most efficient cloud deployment in no time," said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "Now enterprises and cloud services providers can leverage our collaboration with Microsoft and Micron with 100Gb/s to maximize their data center ROI by running more jobs over less expensive infrastructure without compromising on the performance."
"This technology demonstration highlights how Storage Spaces, combined with Micron's advanced flash-based storage connected by Mellanox's 100GbE interconnect solution, helps users build faster, easy-to-scale and reliable storage for their cloud infrastructures," said Siddhartha Roy, Principal Group Program Manager, Windows Server and Services, Microsoft.
"High-speed access to storage is critical to capitalizing on the low latencies delivered by SSDs. Collaboration like this across networking, software, and storage leaders is an essential part of delivering optimized next-generation enterprise architectures," said Eric Endebrock, VP of marketing for storage solutions at Micron. "The end result is improved TCO for IT administrators, who can reduce the number of servers they need."
ConnectX-4 is the first I/O adapter in the industry to deliver 100Gb/s throughput supporting both the InfiniBand and the Ethernet standard protocols. Leveraging high-speed interconnect solutions at 100Gb/s with RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) with the most advanced Software Defined Storage and SSD technologies eliminates performance bottlenecks. Utilizing these high-performance components makes CloudX the ideal platform for today's very demanding cloud infrastructures.
