Cavium™ FastLinQ® Enables Scalable Networking for HyperConverged Infrastructure

Meets Challenging networking demands of HPE SimpliVity, Microsoft Windows Storage Spaces Direct and VMware vSAN while delivering predictable performance and scalability

SAN JOSE, CA – January 23, 2018 – Today, Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise and cloud data centers, announced that its family of FastLinQ^® 10/25GbE Ethernet NICs power HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions from industry leaders like Microsoft® Windows Storage Spaces Direct, VMware® vSAN, and HPE SimpliVity® enabling linear scalability and predictable performance. The Cavium FastLinQ 10/25GbE family, with millions of Ethernet ports shipped, a flexible architecture and scalable high performance, is ideal for accelerating HyperConverged infrastructure solutions and is amongst the top choices for enterprise cloud data centers.

In the era of hybrid cloud and DevOps, IT departments are under tremendous pressure to move faster and be more agile. Traditional architectures driven by complex manual processes and non-integrated infrastructures cannot deliver the power, simplicity, and velocity that is necessary to meet the demands of the modern enterprise. HyperConverged infrastructure systems provide a simple, efficient, software-defined platform that combines networking and storage along with powerful orchestration software delivering the agility and economics of cloud for on-premises infrastructure. HyperConverged infrastructure systems empower IT to reduce cost and complexity while delivering service agility. Ethernet forms the networking backbone connecting HCI systems together and networking requirements can grow exponentially as these systems scale. The success of HyperConverged Infrastructures requires a resilient and scalable network architecture built on high-speed Ethernet NICs that ensure consistent performance and availability.

“HCI architectures encompass software defined methodologies that integrate compute, storage, and networking on commodity hardware to deliver a cost-effective solution that is simple to deploy, manage and scale. HCI is a fundamental building block of on-premises data centers for enterprises building hybrid clouds where 25GbE connectivity is in high demand,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., senior research director and advisor of cloud and data center research practice for IHS Markit, a global business information provider. In a recent IHS Markit report [1], it was forecasted that 25GbE ports will represent 31% of total Ethernet adapter ports shipped in CY’21, signaling a strong need for Ethernet adapters that provide predictable low latency connectivity under fully loaded conditions.

“Cavium FastLinQ 10/25GbE Ethernet NICs with Universal RDMA are designed to accelerate networking for HyperConverged Systems while offloading server CPU,” said Christopher Moezzi, Vice President of Marketing, Ethernet Adapter Group, Cavium. “Customers deploying a wide range of HCI options from HPE, VMware and Microsoft can now leverage Cavium NICs to enable scale and flexibility to implement radical infrastructure simplification while reducing cost with 10GBASE-T.”

Ravi Rao, Group Manager, Windows Networking, Microsoft Corp. said, “Software-Defined Hyper-converged Storage with Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct are key elements of Windows Server Software Defined solution offerings that enable flexible, economical, and high-performance data centers. Software- Defined Data center Premium qualified Cavium FastLinQ 45000/41000 Series of 10/25GbE NICs with support for RoCE, RoCEv2, and iWARP deliver the ability to power software-defined Storage Spaces Direct architectures built using Windows Server 2016.”

“As customers deal with the rapid proliferation of apps and seek alternatives to legacy infrastructure, hyperconverged platforms are becoming a popular choice for modern workload deployment,” said McLeod Glass, VP of SimpliVity, Software-Defined and Cloud Product Management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “We are proud to offer HPE Ethernet 10GbE NICs based on Cavium FastlinQ 8400 series technology as options for our flagship SimpliVity 380 hyperconverged infrastructure portfolio that enables customers to precisely align our technology with an organization’s unique IT environment and workloads.”

Purpose built for accelerating and simplifying data center networking, Cavium FastLinQ Ethernet technology delivers:

•       Enterprise Features – A broad spectrum of Ethernet speeds ranging from 10GbE to 100GbE to host the most demanding enterprise, telco and cloud applications leveraging HyperConverged architectures. Cavium SmartAN™ technology enables adaptive link controls for seamless zero-touch interoperability with industry wide 25GbE switches and cables. Extensive and robust support of a broad variety of hypervisors like VMware ESXi, Windows Server Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and KVM for seamless integration on diverse HyperConverged platforms.

•       Acceleration and Scalability for HCI – Industry’s only network adapter that delivers the ultimate choice and investment protection with concurrent support for RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP. Acceleration for Network Virtualization by offloading protocol processing for VxLAN, NVGRE, GRE and GENEVE enables customers to build and scale virtualized networks without impacting network performance.

•       Storage Acceleration - Concurrent protocol offload for NVMe-oF™, NVMe-Direct, SMB Direct, iSER, iSCSI and FCoE delivers up to 5M IOPS while consuming the fewer server CPU cycles, leaving headroom for virtual applications and higher RoI on server investments with seamless upgrade paths of next-generation storage connectivity.

•       Industry’s Most Comprehensive Network Adapter portfolio – Cavium offers the broadest set of Ethernet networking adapters – FastLinQ® Standard Ethernet adapters, Converged Networking adapters and LiquidIO™ SmartNICs that cover the entire spectrum of customer Ethernet connectivity and offload requirements.

Availability

The new FastLinQ Series 10/25Gbps Ethernet adapters are qualified for VMware vSAN and Microsoft Windows S2D and are available from Cavium and leading OEMs and ODMs worldwide. Cavium LiquidIO 10/25GbE SmartNICs are available directly through Cavium. 10GbE I/O options based on Cavium FastLinQ 8400 series technology for HPE SimpliVity DL380 are available from HPE.

For more information, visit www.cavium.com

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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.

Media Contact

Angel Atondo
Sr. Marketing Communications Manager
Telephone: +1 408-943-7417
Email: angel.atondo@cavium.com 

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Cavium FastLinQ® Delivers Advanced Networking I/O for HPE Gen 10 Servers

New 10GbE and 25GbE NICs deliver a secure, high performance solution with Universal RDMA

SAN JOSE, CA – November 28, 2017 – Today, Cavium™, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise and cloud data centers, announced that its FastLinQ QL41000 Series of 10/25GbE Ethernet NICs are now available from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for HPE ProLiant and HPE Apollo Gen10 servers. Cavium FastLinQ Ethernet technology with Universal RDMA is purpose-built to accelerate access to networking and flash storage while offloading server CPU. The introduction of FastLinQ 10/25GbE NICs into HPE’s broad portfolio of Gen10 servers, including select HPE ProLiant DL, ML and HPE Apollo servers, provides customers with an innovative solution delivering flexibility in choice of RDMA and cost savings for next generation Private, Hybrid and Telco Cloud data centers. This, along with the recent announcement of Cavium FastLinQ 25/50GbE NICs for HPE Synergy, completes the availability of Cavium NICs across the HPE Gen10 server portfolio.

The FastLinQ technology in the new HPE Ethernet 10GbE 52x Series and HPE Ethernet 10/25GbE 62x Series adapters coupled with new generation of HPE servers empower data center administrators to optimize their server infrastructure costs, increase application performance and deliver a future-proof design. Leveraging built-in technologies like concurrent support for RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP (Universal RDMA) and SR-IOV,  tenant workloads and infrastructure traffic can scale to deliver business results.  With full offloads for tunneling protocols including VxLAN, GENEVE and NVGRE, the new HPE adapters deliver near line-rate performance for Software Defined Networking (SDN) workloads enabling Telcos and MSPs to seamlessly deploy, manage and scale the most demanding tenant workloads. Extending Cavium’s legacy and expertise in security, FastLinQ NICs deliver robust security features like Secure Firmware Updates and UEFI Secure Boot, which enables HPE Secure Compute Lifecycle on Gen10 servers to offer best-in-class innovations in protection, malware detection, and recovery.

“The advent of NVMe and persistent memory, coupled with the introduction of the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processor family, have enabled higher workload and virtual machine density for enterprise and hybrid cloud architectures, putting even more importance on the flexibility and performance of the networking solution,” said Seamus Crehan, President of Crehan Research. “Adapters based on Cavium’s FastLinQ 41000 Series technology deliver this flexibility and performance with Universal RDMA offloads which should meet the networking demands of next-gen applications while delivering a secure and future-proof solution.”

“The FastLinQ 41000 family delivers customers technology choice and investment protection by supporting concurrent RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP – Universal RDMA,” said Rajneesh Gaur, Vice President and General Manager of Ethernet Adapter Group, Cavium. “The introduction of this new class of I/O connectivity for a broad range of HPE Gen 10 compute platforms provides significant VM density, by allowing customers to remove all I/O bottnecks and utilize the full potential of the HPE Gen 10 servers.”

“Intelligent networking is a critical component for an agile application and delivering a secure environment for a hybrid infrastructure,” said Tom Lattin, VP and GM of HPE Mass Market Platforms, Options, & Software.  “One of our key goals in collaborating with Cavium on their FastLinQ 10/25GbE technology was to enhance the performance and security of HPE ProLiant and HPE Apollo Gen10 servers.”

Purpose-built for accelerating and simplifying datacenter networking, Cavium FastLinQ Ethernet technology in HPE ProLiant and HPE Apollo servers deliver:

• 10GBASE-T: Utilize low cost Cat6a cables and RJ-45 connections for 10GbE, eliminating the need for potentially expensive 10GbE SFP+ optics. This reduces deployment costs by up to 46%(1) and is backward compatible with 1GbE infrastructure.
• Universal RDMA – Industry’s only network adapter that offers customers a flexibility of RDMA technology, customer can choose RoCE/RoCEv2 for small to medium scale deployments on a lossless ethernet network and iWARP for large cloud scale architectures built on standard Ethernet fabrics.
• Cavium SmartAN™ Technology - Supports auto configuration of the adapter when connecting between 10GbE and 25GbE networks, eliminating server administrator intervention for manually configuring port speeds and FECs. Cavium FastLinQ SmartANtechnology along with extensive interop testing virtually eliminate interoperability challenges in physical layer networks.
• Network and Server Virtualization Offloads – Acceleration for Network Virtualization by offloading protocol processing for VxLAN, NVGRE, GRE and GENEVE, enabling customers to build and scale virtualized networks without impacting network performance. Optimize infrastructure costs and increase virtual machine density by leveraging technologies like SR-IOV that deliver acceleration and QoS for enterprise workloads.
• Flexible Archtecture: A flexible microcoded architecture delivers faster time to market and adaption to new and emerging technologies, extending the return of investment in FastLinQ NIC technology

The new HPE adapters from Cavium are also capable of supporting additional advanced features that will be enabled by HPE with firmware upgrades in early CY2018. These include:

• NIC Partioning – Optimize infrastructure and streamline traffic management using NIC Partitioning (NPAR) that delivers up to 16 physical functions per adapter with QoS.
• Network Function Virtualization (NFV) – Enables Telcos and NFV application vendors to seamlessly deploy, manage and accelerate the most demanding NFV workloads by delivering up to 36 Million small packet performance, MPLSoUDP offload and integration with OpenStack.
• Storage Acceleration: Full protocol offload for iSCSI, FCoE and NVMe over Fabrics delivers up to 3M IOPS while consuming the fewest server CPU cycles, leaving headroom for virtual applications and enabling higher ROI on server investments.

Availability
The new 10/25Gbps Ethernet adapters based on Cavium FastLinQ 41000 Series technology are now available from HPE. These include

• HPE Ethernet 10/25Gb 2-port 621SFP28 Adapter
• HPE Ethernet 10/25Gb 2-port 622FLR-SFP28 CNA
• HPE Ethernet 10Gb 2-port 521T Adapter

For more information, visit www.qlogic.com/info/hpe and www.cavium.com

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.

Media Contact
Angel Atondo
Sr. Marketing Communications Manager
Cavium, Inc.
Telephone: +1 408-943-7417
Email: angel.atondo@cavium.com

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Cavium FastLinQ® Ethernet Enables Universal RDMA for Dell EMC 14th Generation PowerEdge Servers

Concurrent 10/25GbE iWARP and RoCE deliver ultimate flexibility to accelerate I/O with CPU offload

SAN JOSE, CA – July 11, 2017 – Today, Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise and cloud data centers, announced the new FastLinQ® QL41000 Series of 10/25GbE Ethernet NICs, which are supported on Dell EMC14th Generation PowerEdge servers. The FastLinQ QL41000 Series are the industry’s only NIC solution that gives customers the technology choice and investment protection with support for concurrent RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP.  The FastLinQ adapters coupled with new generation PowerEdge servers enable administrators to optimize their infrastructure costs and increase virtual machine density by leveraging built-in technologies like SR-IOV and Network Partitioning (NPAR) that deliver acceleration and quality of service (QoS) for workloads and infrastructure traffic.  Additionally, the FastLinQ adapters provide full network function virtualization (NFV) with excellent small packet performance and integration with DPDK and OpenStack, enabling telcos and NFV application customers to seamlessly deploy, manage and accelerate the most demanding NFV workloads.

“Enterprise and cloud data centers have differing requirements driven by infrastructure and applications for latency and congestion management, so flexibility of the networking solution is key, said Bob Wheeler, principal analyst at The Linley Group. Cavium FastLinQ 41000 Series family with Universal RDMA effectively addresses these challenges while delivering a flexible and future proof networking solution.

“Cavium FastLinQ 10GbE/25GbE Ethernet NICs, with Universal RDMA are designed to accelerate access to networking and storage while offloading server CPU,” said Rajneesh Gaur, vice president and general manager, Ethernet Adapter Group, at Cavium. “The introduction of Universal RDMA in Dell’s flagship 14G server is a major milestone and provides customers with an innovative solution delivering flexibility in choice of RDMA and cost savings for next generation private, hybrid and telco cloud data centers.”

“Dell EMC 14th generation PowerEdge Servers are delivering a scalable, automated and secure architecture for any workload, from traditional to cloud-native applications and converged platforms,”  said Brian Payne, vice president product management and marketing, server solutions division, Dell EMC. “With the unique Universal RDMA capabilities in the FastLinQ QL41000 Series Ethernet NICs in the new PowerEdge servers, customers can transform their infrastructure for modern workloads and cloud initiatives by increasing performance while optimizing infrastructure costs.”

Purpose built to accelerate and simplify data center networking, Cavium FastLinQ Ethernet technology in Dell PowerEdge servers delivers:

• Universal RDMA – Industry’s only network adapter that offers customers a choice of RDMA technology and investment protection with concurrent support for RoCE, RoCEv2 and iWARP.

• Network Virtualization Offloads – Acceleration for network virtualization by offloading protocol processing for VxLAN, NVGRE, GRE and GENEVE, enabling customers to build and scale virtualized networks without impacting network performance.

• Server Virtualization – Optimizes infrastructure costs and increase virtual machine density by leveraging built-in technologies like SR-IOV and NIC Partitioning (NPAR) that deliver acceleration and QoS for workloads and infrastructure traffic.

• Network Function Virtualization (NFV) – Enables telco and NFV application vendors to seamlessly deploy, manage and accelerate the most demanding NFV workloads by delivering leading small packet performance and integration with DPDK and OpenStack.

• Storage Acceleration: Full protocol offload for iSCSI and FCoE delivers up to 3M IOPS while consuming the fewest server CPU cycles, leaving headroom for virtual applications and enabling higher ROI on server investments.

Availability
The new FastLinQ 41000 Series 10/25Gbps Ethernet adapters are now available from Dell EMC.

For more information, visit www.qlogic.com and www.cavium.com

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.

Media Contact
Angel Atondo
Sr. Marketing Communications Manager
Cavium, Inc.
Telephone: +1 408-943-7417
Email: angel.atondo@cavium.com

Read More