At the SC18 conference today Excelero,
a disruptor in software-defined block storage, announced that its
NVMesh 2 software will support the BlueField dual-port 100Gb/s
system-on-a-chip (SoC) and smart network interface card (SmartNIC)
adapters from Mellanox. BlueField's record-setting NVMe over Fabrics
IOPs and ultra low latency will add to the already impressive
performance and cost-advantage that Excelero's NVMesh software delivers
for today's most demanding applications, including high performance
computing. Because computers using NVMesh on BlueField offload IO
processing to the BlueField SmartNIC, they free CPU resources for other
much needed processing tasks, achieving greater cost-efficiency.
In
addition, since NVMesh software drivers reside on the BlueField
SmartNIC, IT teams running NVMesh on BlueField platforms avoid the need
to install client-side drivers - and get an OS-agnostic storage solution
that runs automatically on any OS supporting NVMe, such as Windows,
proprietary and non-standard Linux distributions, MacOS, VMware and
other enterprise platforms.
As
the high performance computing (HPC) community embraces NVMe Flash
storage, the Excelero NVMesh/BlueField combination offers an
industry-leading approach that delivers the near-instant response times
of local NVMe that users crave, while benefitting from the efficiencies
of centralized storage. The elimination of software driver complexity
and wide OS platform support give HPC environments the same flexibility
that IT leaders demand for web-scale applications.
The
BlueField dual port 100Gb/s SoC solutions combine Mellanox's leading
ConnectX-5 network acceleration technology with an array of
high-performance 64-bit Arm A72 processor cores and a PCIe Gen3 and Gen4
switch. The BlueField SmartNIC adapters have demonstrated 7.5 million
IOPS, with zero CPU utilization and under 3 microseconds of NVMe-oF
latency - performance that is the perfect fit for NVMesh's design for
enabling shared NVMe Flash at local performance.
"Mellanox's
BlueField family of SmartNICs, storage controllers and
systems-on-a-chip provide smart and scalable NVMe accelerations that are
a great fit for HPC applications requiring superior efficiency and low
total cost of ownership," said Gilad Shainer, vice president of
Marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "Leveraging the advantages of
BlueField, Excelero is poised to extend the value of software-defined
block storage platforms, accelerating the next generations of high
performance computing."
"Every
IT manager needs smart ways to do more with the same resources, and
BlueField along with NVMesh is an outstanding way to accomplish this for
demanding web-scale applications," said Yaniv Romem, CTO of Excelero.
"We are delighted to be the first NVMe software-defined storage provider
to support the Mellanox BlueField platform, and to continue our support
for Mellanox's 100Gb/s solutions."
Excelero
is presently testing BlueField SmartNIC configurations, with BlueField
support planned in spring 2019 in the just-announced NVMesh 2.