Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. introduced new BlueField-based storage controllers, which are being showcased this week at the Flash Memory Summit conference. These controllers offer ultra-high performance for Ethernet Storage Fabrics, along with extreme efficiency and programmable virtualization for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), empowering customers to build and deploy the world’s fastest and most flexible networked flash storage solutions.
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.
“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.”
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 (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs). 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.”