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Cavium FastLinQ Enables Scalable Networking for HyperConverged Infrastructure 

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 23, 2018 -- Today, Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise and cloud data centers, announced that its family of FastLinQ 10/25GbE Ethernet NICs power HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions from industry leaders like Microsoft Windows Storage Spaces Direct, VMware vSAN, and HPE SimpliVity enabling linear scalability and predictable performance. The Cavium FastLinQ 10/25GbE family, with millions of Ethernet ports shipped, a flexible architecture and scalable high performance, is ideal for accelerating HyperConverged infrastructure solutions and is amongst the top choices for enterprise cloud data centers.

In the era of hybrid cloud and DevOps, IT departments are under tremendous pressure to move faster and be more agile. Traditional architectures driven by complex manual processes and non-integrated infrastructures cannot deliver the power, simplicity, and velocity that is necessary to meet the demands of the modern enterprise. HyperConverged infrastructure systems provide a simple, efficient, software-defined platform that combines networking and storage along with powerful orchestration software delivering the agility and economics of cloud for on-premises infrastructure. HyperConverged infrastructure systems empower IT to reduce cost and complexity while delivering service agility. Ethernet forms the networking backbone connecting HCI systems together and networking requirements can grow exponentially as these systems scale. The success of HyperConverged Infrastructures requires a resilient and scalable network architecture built on high-speed Ethernet NICs that ensure consistent performance and availability.

“HCI architectures encompass software defined methodologies that integrate compute, storage, and networking on commodity hardware to deliver a cost-effective solution that is simple to deploy, manage and scale. HCI is a fundamental building block of on-premises data centers for enterprises building hybrid clouds where 25GbE connectivity is in high demand,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., senior research director and advisor of cloud and data center research practice for IHS Markit, a global business information provider. In a recent IHS Markit report [1], it was forecasted that 25GbE ports will represent 31% of total Ethernet adapter ports shipped in CY’21, signaling a strong need for Ethernet adapters that provide predictable low latency connectivity under fully loaded conditions.

“Cavium FastLinQ 10/25GbE Ethernet NICs with Universal RDMA are designed to accelerate networking for HyperConverged Systems while offloading server CPU,” said Christopher Moezzi, Vice President of Marketing, Ethernet Adapter Group, Cavium. “Customers deploying a wide range of HCI options from HPE, VMware and Microsoft can now leverage Cavium NICs to enable scale and flexibility to implement radical infrastructure simplification while reducing cost with 10GBASE-T.”

Ravi Rao, Group Manager, Windows Networking, Microsoft Corp. said, “Software-Defined Hyper-converged Storage with Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct are key elements of Windows Server Software Defined solution offerings that enable flexible, economical, and high-performance data centers. Software- Defined Data center Premium qualified Cavium FastLinQ 45000/41000 Series of 10/25GbE NICs with support for RoCE, RoCEv2, and iWARP deliver the ability to power software-defined Storage Spaces Direct architectures built using Windows Server 2016.”

“As customers deal with the rapid proliferation of apps and seek alternatives to legacy infrastructure, hyperconverged platforms are becoming a popular choice for modern workload deployment,” said McLeod Glass, VP of SimpliVity, Software-Defined and Cloud Product Management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “We are proud to offer HPE Ethernet 10GbE NICs based on Cavium FastlinQ 8400 series technology as options for our flagship SimpliVity 380 hyperconverged infrastructure portfolio that enables customers to precisely align our technology with an organization’s unique IT environment and workloads.”

Purpose built for accelerating and simplifying data center networking, Cavium FastLinQ Ethernet technology delivers:

  • Enterprise Features – A broad spectrum of Ethernet speeds ranging from 10GbE to 100GbE to host the most demanding enterprise, telco and cloud applications leveraging HyperConverged architectures. Cavium SmartAN technology enables adaptive link controls for seamless zero-touch interoperability with industry wide 25GbE switches and cables. Extensive and robust support of a broad variety of hypervisors like VMware ESXi, Windows Server Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and KVM for seamless integration on diverse HyperConverged platforms.
  • Acceleration and Scalability for HCI – Industry’s only network adapter that delivers the ultimate choice and investment protection with concurrent support for RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP. Acceleration for Network Virtualization by offloading protocol processing for VxLAN, NVGRE, GRE and GENEVE enables customers to build and scale virtualized networks without impacting network performance.
  • Storage Acceleration - Concurrent protocol offload for NVMe-oF, NVMe-Direct, SMB Direct, iSER, iSCSI and FCoE delivers up to 5M IOPS while consuming the fewer server CPU cycles, leaving headroom for virtual applications and higher ROI on server investments with seamless upgrade paths of next-generation storage connectivity.
  • Industry’s Most Comprehensive Network Adapter portfolio – Cavium offers the broadest set of Ethernet networking adapters – FastLinQ® Standard Ethernet adapters, Converged Networking adapters and LiquidIO® Smart NICs that cover the entire spectrum of customer Ethernet connectivity and offload requirements.

Availability

The new FastLinQ Series 10/25Gbps Ethernet adapters are qualified for VMware vSAN and Microsoft Windows S2D and are available from Cavium and leading OEMs and ODMs worldwide. Cavium LiquidIO 10/25GbE Smart NICs are available directly through Cavium. 10GbE I/O options based on Cavium FastLinQ 8400 series technology for HPE SimpliVity DL380 are available from HPE.

About Cavium

Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), offers a broad portfolio of infrastructure solutions for compute, security, storage, switching, connectivity and baseband processing. Cavium’s highly integrated multi-core SoC products deliver software compatible solutions across low to high performance points enabling secure and intelligent functionality in Enterprise, Data Center and Service Provider Equipment. Cavium processors and solutions are supported by an extensive ecosystem of operating systems, tools, application stacks, hardware reference designs and other products. Cavium is headquartered in San Jose, CA with design centers in California, Massachusetts, India, Israel, China and Taiwan.


Source: Cavium

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