Cavium Announces Availability of Driver to Support NVMe Over Fibre Channel

Cavium NVMe™ over Fibre Channel Driver Is now available for servers running Enterprise Linux from SUSE® and Red Hat®

SAN JOSE, CA – April 30, 2018 – Cavium™, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM) a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking, today announced the availability of a unified driver that enables native support for FC-NVMe protocol for servers running enterprise Linux from Red Hat and SUSE.

This unified driver delivers simultaneous support for FCP-SCSI and FC-NVMe protocols on the same port for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3 kernel version 4.4.120 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5. Cavium is actively engaged with major OSVs to enable native FC-NVMe support on other platforms, as well.

Cavium chairs the INCITS T11 standards committee on FC-NVMe that has been driving the definition and development of the FC-NVMe protocol over the past three years, and is at the forefront of support for NVMe over Fibre Channel.

The new unified driver works with both the Cavium QLogic® 2690 Family of Gen5 (16GFC) Fibre Channel Adapters, as well as, the Cavium QLogic 2700 Family of Gen6 (32GFC) Fibre Channel Adapters for the most flexible deployment.

Cavium’s unified driver with native FC-NVMe support enables flash storage to further accelerate mission critical workloads, such as ERP, business intelligence and messaging and collaboration systems by:

• Lowering read access times to networked storage
• Reducing processing time with a streamlined and simplified protocol interface compared to SCSI
• Increasing scalability and improving response times with a highly parallelized architecture and extremely deep queuing structures  

   “Cavium has long been at the forefront of storage innovation, and we’re excited to be working with our partners to bring FC-NVMe technology to market.  FC-NVMe represents a natural progression for SAN connectivity, and provides value by delivering performance gains that leverage existing infrastructure.  FC-NVMe couples extremely scalable, low latency flash storage with the most reliable, secure and widely deployed storage network in the data center allowing customers to continue to scale their infrastructure to meet future business needs”, said Vikram Karvat, vice president and general manager, Fibre Channel Storage Group, Cavium.

"Broadcom is modernizing Fibre Channel for the next wave of technology innovation coming with NVMe storage,” said Jack Rondoni, senior vice president and general manager, Brocade Storage Networking division at Broadcom. “Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel directors and switches are at the heart of the transition to NVMe with purpose-built SAN technology designed to address the low latency and reliability requirements for NVMe-based storage. Brocade and Cavium QLogic have a long history of development, integration, and testing that ensures our shared customers can deploy NVMe solutions with confidence.”

"Cavium QLogic worked closely with SUSE in the development of NVMe over Fibre Channel drivers on SUSE Enterprise Linux Server," said Olaf Kirch, VP SUSE Linux Enterprise. "FC-NVMe is an exciting development for the storage industry, offering improved storage solutions to meet tomorrow's challenges. Cavium and SUSE are committed to serving our customers' needs for superior Fibre Channel storage solutions."

More information about More information about the unified driver software is available at www.cavium.com/fc-nvme.html

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About Cavium
Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), offers a broad portfolio of infrastructure solutions for compute, security, storage, switching, connectivity and baseband processing. Cavium’s highly integrated multi-core SoC products deliver software compatible solutions across low to high performance points enabling secure and intelligent functionality in Enterprise, Data Center and Service Provider Equipment. Cavium processors and solutions are supported by an extensive ecosystem of operating systems, tools, application stacks, hardware reference designs and other products. Cavium is headquartered in San Jose, CA with design centers in California, Massachusetts, India, Israel, China and Taiwan. For more information about the Company, please visit www.cavium.com.

Media Contact:
Angel Atondo
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Telephone: +1 408-943-7417
Email: angel.atondo@cavium.com