Cavium supports NVMe over Fibre Channel
- Auteur:Ella Cai
- Relâchez le:2017-08-11
The company’s QLogic 2700 series Gen 6 and 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) support connecting NVMe storage over Fibre Channel networks concurrently with the existing storage by using the updated firmware and drivers.
The FC-NVMe drivers are for customers connecting flash-based storage arrays to servers over Fibre Channel networks.
They can be used in what the company calls “Initiator mode”, with drivers and firmware for hosts containing initiator mode QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 or 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 HBAs; in “Target mode”, with drivers for storage servers or array controllers containing target mode QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 or 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 HBAs; or in “Target mode (SPDK)”, with drivers (based on user mode SPDK technology) for storage servers or array controllers containing target mode QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 or 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 HBAs.
INCITS/T11 committee for Fibre Channel Interfaces recently approved the standard ensuring concurrent support and interoperability for FC-NVMe and the existing Fibre Channel protocols.
Workloads that demand higher throughput, IOPs and lower latency are moving to flash. The NVM Express protocol has been designed from the ground up for flash, and features deep parallelism, random access, and allows access to flash over PCI Express (PCIe) to maximise bandwidth.
The new standard extends these benefits over a Fibre Channel fabric, said Cavium. The low latency, lossless and efficient data handling capabilities of Fibre Channel are ideally suited to extend the performance and latency advantages of NVM Express over a network.
The FC-NVMe drivers are for customers connecting flash-based storage arrays to servers over Fibre Channel networks.
They can be used in what the company calls “Initiator mode”, with drivers and firmware for hosts containing initiator mode QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 or 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 HBAs; in “Target mode”, with drivers for storage servers or array controllers containing target mode QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 or 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 HBAs; or in “Target mode (SPDK)”, with drivers (based on user mode SPDK technology) for storage servers or array controllers containing target mode QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 or 2690 Series Enhanced Gen 5 HBAs.
INCITS/T11 committee for Fibre Channel Interfaces recently approved the standard ensuring concurrent support and interoperability for FC-NVMe and the existing Fibre Channel protocols.
Workloads that demand higher throughput, IOPs and lower latency are moving to flash. The NVM Express protocol has been designed from the ground up for flash, and features deep parallelism, random access, and allows access to flash over PCI Express (PCIe) to maximise bandwidth.
The new standard extends these benefits over a Fibre Channel fabric, said Cavium. The low latency, lossless and efficient data handling capabilities of Fibre Channel are ideally suited to extend the performance and latency advantages of NVM Express over a network.
