Solarflare, a pioneer in the development of neural-class networks, today announced that the company will demonstrate NVMe over TCP storage fabrics technology with industry collaborators Intel, Supermicro, Smart IOPS and EXTEN Technologies, at Flash Memory Summit, today through Aug. 9 in booth #128 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. NVMe over TCP storage fabrics deliver the same performance, usability and streamlined deployment benefits associated with more complicated proprietary networks, but at a lower cost.

In the past, network latency was rarely an issue because disk drives were typically the source of performance bottlenecks. However, as storage media has migrated from disk to flash, networks have become the bottleneck. Applications harnessing hundreds-to-thousands of servers in the data center are constantly accessing random bits of data distributed across these servers.

Commodity, high-performance NVMe over TCP storage fabrics solve this network bottleneck problem with acceleration services running over streamlined Ethernet networks. By leveraging the native Ethernet TCP transport ubiquitous in every data center, NVMe over TCP eliminates the need for proprietary Ethernet extensions, and is equivalent to any other technology to date.

"Cloud and enterprise data centers are looking forward to cost-effective, low-latency NVMe storage fabrics to scale-out flash without performance degradation," said Ahmet Houssein, VP of Marketing and Strategic Development, Solarflare. "NVMe over TCP technology is an industry game changer, allowing customers to efficiently overlay a storage fabric onto their existing network that performs within 10 percent of locally connected high performance flash storage."

Solarflare at Flash Memory Summit

At Flash Memory Summit, Solarflare and Intel will demonstrate Intel's groundbreaking new memory media line of SSDs - Optane^TM, the lowest-latency storage over TCP with Solarflare's innovative approach to NVMe over TCP. The combination provides customers with access to remote data faster than ever before. Intel and Solarflare will illustrate how to achieve disaggregated access end-to-end latency as low as 15 microseconds, utilizing Solarflare's high performance XtremeScale^TM Network Adapter and software.

In addition, Solarflare, Supermicro, Smart IOPS and EXTEN Technologies will demonstrate all-flash software-defined storage servers and NVMe over TCP fabrics that represent the future of cost-effective, ultra-high-performance networked storage.

Attend Solarflare Talks at Flash Memory Summit

• Aug. 8 - 11:30 a.m. - Ahmet Houssein, VP of Marketing & Strategic Development, will present the keynote address "Data Explosion Demands Ethernet-Based Fast Flash Fabrics"
• Aug. 8 - 5:45 p.m. - Tom Spencer, Senior Director of Product Marketing, will host a theater talk discussing the "Five Reasons Why TCP for NVMe-oF is Cool"

Solarflare XtremeScale X2 NICs

For modern data centers, Solarflare XtremeScale X2 NICs lay a new foundation for NIC-based network virtualization needed by distributed applications with inter-connected cloud services, machine learning, and big data workloads. Solarflare's X2 NIC is the first and only NIC platform that can establish ultra-scale connectivity to thousands of virtual networks, while at the same time provide real-time packet and flow information. This foundation of ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-low latency, ultra-scale connectivity and packet telemetry allows X2 NICs to serve as the industry's first commercial platform for micro-segmented acceleration, security and visibility providing NIC fabric services that scale with each server, VM or container.

The NVMe over TCP specification is expected to be standardized within the second half of 2018. Every Solarflare XtremeScale adapter and software will be backward compliant to the specification at no additional cost.