Showing posts with label networking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label networking. Show all posts

Tuesday, 23 January 2018

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 

Monday, 30 May 2016

Cavium Showcases The CloudScale Rack™

A Fully Cavium Powered Rack for Flexible and Scalable Software Defined Data Centers
TAIPEI, Taiwan., May 30, 2016 – Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking today showcased CloudScale Rack™ solution that demonstrates a complete cloud data center enabled using customer platforms built on Cavium's product portfolio. 

Today's data center platforms are built using legacy building blocks that evolved over time and are unable to address the growing complexity and scale of current data centers. Servers are not Workload Optimized™. They use legacy one-size-fits all processors and require NICs, HBAs and offload cards to meet the storage and virtualization needs of data centers. Fixed server configurations make it very challenging to seamlessly provision and move workloads across the data center. Legacy L3, L2 switches are designed for wiring closets and not for modern data centers. They use fixed function ASICs that limit visibility making it difficult to capture errant events, identify latency and congestion hotspots.

Modern data centers need flow based switching and ability to quickly deploy emerging protocols. These are not supported by legacy switches. Traditional data center security appliances require specialized hardware modules for secure key storage and authentication. They do not support security in a multi-tenant environment and are not suitable for securing virtual networks. Traditional custom appliances are designed with the point of view of physical network constraints and are not suitable for scale out virtualized data centers.
There arises a need for a new approach for a software defined rack solution across network, storage and compute to deliver the scalability, flexibility and efficiency to compete in the future where hyperscale is mandatory. This new approach is the scalable rack solution with a range of Workload Optimized servers for compute, storage, networking and management modules that work together to build a wide range of on-demand logical, virtual systems, which are more adoptable and scalable to emerging networking protocol and security needs of the cloud.

Cavium delivers silicon and software building blocks engineered from the ground up for flexible, scalable software defined data centers. The CloudScale Rack includes
  • ThunderX® Workload Optimized processors for compute, secure compute, storage, big data and networking server applications.
  • LiquidIO® Intelligent NICs that offload and enable high performance distributed server load balancing, firewall, VM acceleration and virtualized elastic storage with NVMe over Ethernet protocol.
  • XPliant® Flexible, high throughput data center Ethernet switches.
  • LiquidSecurity™ Appliance delivering comprehensive elastic security to virtualized data centers including authentication and key management for multi-tenant data centers.
CloudScale Rack is a flexible & scalable fully standards based solution based on OEM/ODM platforms developed using Cavium silicon building blocks. CloudScale Rack allows scale-out of individual rack elements, while the entire rack cabinet behaves as scalable unit of data center. Cavium CloudScale Rack solution enables a range of powerful capabilities:
  • ThunderX based Workload Optimized servers enable seamless deployment of virtual machines through hardware support for dedicated IO for each virtual machine, VM to VM isolation, VM security and VM to VM switching.  
  • ThunderX based Workload Optimized servers integrate all the networking, storage and accelerator capabilities required to run a typical Data Center Application. This enables customers to reconfigure ThunderX based server on demand to dynamically change the type of application running on the server using OpenStack
  • East-West traffic between ThunderX based clusters in the rack can be directly switched using built in fabric in ThunderX lowering application latency and reducing number of leaf switch ports.
  • LiquidIO adapters plugged into ThunderX servers enable distributed server load balancing, firewall, and virtualized elastic storage with NVM over Ethernet protocol.
  • Cavium LiquidSecurity appliance provides authentication and key management on a per VM basis for IAAS and SAAS deployments.
  • XPliant Software Defined (SDN) top of rack switches support a complete set of networking protocols with future proof flexibility to support emerging new protocols including
    • Support for advanced high performance routing in and out of tunnels enabling distributed VXLAN support in enterprise class datacenters.  
    • Advanced programmable telemetry for capturing networking events leading to higher availability, less downtime and better networking efficiency.
    • Flexible table memory allocation to support the most demanding high scale software defined tunneled flow based networks.
  • XPliant software loadable profiles support multiple Places in the Network (PINs) with a single hardware SKU
  • XPliant switches work together with ThunderX SoC to implement VM level access control and monitoring capabilities. End to end fabric management can be implemented using Openflow APIs.
“Cavium is one of the few semiconductor companies with a comprehensive portfolio of products from switching to security to intelligent NICs and servers for the state of the art data centers today” said Raghib Hussain, CTO and Corporate VP/GM of Cavium. “Customers can build an efficient and scalable software defined data center based entirely on Cavium data center technologies.”
"The CloudScale Rack offering tightly couples the state of art software defined XPliant Ethernet switch fabric , Workload Optimized ThunderX servers for compute & storage applications, intelligent LiquidIO offload cards in and LiquidSecurity appliance for VM security & key management “ said Alex Liu, Product Marketing Executive, Network & Communication Business Unit, GIGABYTE. “Today's cloud data center infrastructure requires this level of scalability & flexibility to meet the demands of ever changing workloads, networking protocols and on demand provisioning of the rack. Gigabyte will start sampling the CloudScale Rack in Q3' 2016."
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About Cavium
Cavium is a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing in enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless service provider applications. Cavium offers a broad portfolio of integrated, software compatible processors ranging in performance from 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps that enable secure, intelligent functionality in enterprise, data center, broadband/consumer and access & service provider equipment. Cavium's processors are supported by ecosystem partners that provide operating systems, tool support, reference designs and other services. Cavium's principal offices are in San Jose, California with design team locations in California, Massachusetts, India, and China. For more information, please visit: http://www.cavium.com.


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