2017-03-01






4 min

100G iSCSI Demonstration

“The extreme performance benefits of all-flash storage arrays can be unrealized if inefficient networking is used.”
- Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research

“Chelsio’s T6 100G Unified Wire solution with iSCSI offload consistently enables very high-throughput, low-latency access to flash storage for datacenter applications.”

2 min

100G NVMe-oF Demonstration

“Maximizing application performance and efficiency of server CPUs are critical priorities for datacenter environments,”
- Harvey Newman, Professor of Physics, Caltech

“The Chelsio NVMe over Fabrics 100GbE iWARP demonstration provides clear validation of how high-performance NVMe solid state drives can help datacenters get the most out of their infrastructure assets, maximize performance and improve cost-of-ownership at the same time.”

Chelsio T6 1/10/25/40/50/100G Unified Wire controllers and adapters enable enterprise storage systems that are purpose-built to deliver optimized iSCSI and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage performance for various application workloads in mission-critical virtualized and private cloud environments. The extreme efficiency of T6-enabled storage systems lets IT departments balance ultra-performance, capacity and features with game-changing storage economics. Chelsio-enabled storage systems also easily integrate into diverse enterprise IT environments by enabling SAN and NAS deployments from the same array through iSCSI and TCP/IP protocol offload for iSCSI block-level protocol, as well as NFS and CIFS file-level protocols.

iSCSI Storage Target

Using Chelsio T5/T6 adapters, all-flash and hybrid storage array OEMs can easily enable such arrays with highest-performance iSCSI target capability that is fully compatible with the existing iSCSI ecosystem and seamlessly support the routability, scalability and reach advantages of iSCSI.

Chelsio iSCSI target offload is especially suited for enterprise storage deployments because:

It requires only software peers (that are supported in all volume operating systems) and as such can be non-disruptively deployed in existing environments.

It provides out-of-the-box acceleration for built-in iSCSI target-mode functionality in Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and VMware.

It allows the same redline performance as other storage networking protocols such as NVMe over Fabrics or iSER, and has built-in RDMA.

It is built on the proven TCP/IP protocol and as such can scale, route and handle congestion and network loss resiliently and robustly without needing special switch features.

It runs at 100Gb and beyond, and will scale consistently with Ethernet evolution.

The CPU savings resulting from iSCSI offload results in an immediate bill of materials reduction in storage applications – same or more performance at lower cost.

It allows enterprise OEMs to consider consolidating their adapter vendor product line and hence truly leverages the economies of scale of Ethernet.

NVMe over Fabrics Storage Target

NVMe over Fabrics defines an efficient mechanism to utilize these devices in large scale storage deployments and provides investment protection by allowing the latest in innovations and advances in low latency SSD flash to be used over proven Ethernet iWARP (RDMA/TCP) networking. This enables the NVMe storage devices to be shared, pooled and managed more effectively. Chelsio T6 NVMe over Fabrics capability provides a foundation for lower latency and increased performance, while enabling improved iWARP integration for flash-based storage.

Chelsio T6 NVMe over Fabrics offload capability demonstrates that accessing flash remotely does not need to come at the expense of performance, scalability or error recovery.

T6 providing concurrent support for 100Gb iSCSI offload capability allows customers an instant path to revenue into an existing market. They will not need to choose between iSCSI and NVMe over Fabrics when it comes to the choice of adapter or switch.

T6 offering enables a seamless migration path from 10/40GbE to 400GbE NVMe-oF in the future, while offering the flexibility to fully leverage existing software investments.

Chelsio’s iWARP technology inherits the resilience and congestion management capabilities of TCP/IP and as such can turn any Ethernet topology into a resilient fabric (unlike competing Ethernet RDMA technologies, it does not require a lossless fabric or special switch features to operate).

End users can decouple the storage and switch upgrade cycles, and benefit from incremental NVMe-oF installs. Storage vendors, in turn, can deploy into any pre-existing Ethernet infrastructure.

Using 100GbE iWARP, storage system OEMs and device vendors can easily add the latest generation of Ethernet fabric connectivity to any existing NVMe device.

Resources

Chelsio Unified Wire Storage Target (Video)

100G iSCSI – A Bright Future for Ethernet Storage (Presentation at SNIA DSI 2016)

Chelsio demonstrates 100 Gigabit iSCSI Performance (Press Release)

High Performance iSCSI at 100GbE (White Paper)

Introducing NVMe over 100GbE iWARP Fabrics (White Paper)

Resilient RoCE: Misconceptions vs. Reality (White Paper)

Concurrent Support of NVMe over RDMA Fabrics and Established Networked Block and File Storage (Presentation at Flash Memory Summit, 2016)

Show more