QLogic and Cavium collaborate

QLogic has developed a joint solution with Cavium, a leading provider of products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, wired and wireless networking. The big data infrastructure solution utilizes low-latency QLogic® 25Gb Ethernet (25GbE) RDMA-enabled NICs (RNICs), a massively scalable cluster of compute nodes based on high-performance 48 core ThunderX processors optimized for cloud compute workloads and multi-petabytes of networked storage server nodes, also based on Thunder-X processors optimized for cloud storage workloads. This best-of-breed solution significantly accelerates performance of enterprise storage, cloud storage and big data storage applications such as Ceph and Hadoop, delivering enhanced flexibility and optimized total cost of ownership (TCO).

Current cloud storage and big data architectures rely heavily on scale-out direct-attach storage (DAS) platforms that do not allow for either compute or storage to scale independently of each other. QLogic and Cavium effectively address this scalability issue by providing a disaggregated storage architecture that brings modularity, improved efficiency and higher performance to big data and cloud storage applications.

QLogic 25GbE RNICs provide the unique ability to deliver a heterogeneous remote direct memory access (RDMA) transport comprised of RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), RoCEv2 and iWARP, accelerating cloud and hyperscale workloads without constraints. The ThunderX product family is Cavium’s 64-bit ARMv8-A server processor for next-generation data center and cloud applications. With high performance custom cores, single and dual socket configurations, high memory bandwidth and large memory capacity, ThunderX enables best-in-class performance per dollar and performance per watt. QLogic 25GbE RNICs offload ThunderX platform workloads by delivering a cut-through, scalable and programmable architecture that accelerates object, block and file input/output (I/O), thereby accelerating massively distributed scale-out storage applications. QLogic is the leading solutions provider for Fibre Channel adapters in enterprise storage area network (SAN) applications and is collaborating with Cavium to deliver high performance optimized solutions for enterprise storage applications in the next phase of this partnership.

“The data center infrastructure of the future needs to be intelligent and adaptive to application workload requirements,” said Manoj Gujral, vice president of marketing, Ethernet Products, QLogic. “Our joint development with Cavium will result in solutions that combine the high-performance and outstanding TCO of Thunder-X server and storage system on chip (SoC) processors with QLogic 25GbE RNICs.”

“Thunder-X-based server solutions deliver best-in-class performance per watt and performance per dollar for next-generation data centers and cloud applications,” said Steve Cumings, director of market development, Cavium. “Cavium’s joint development and partnership with QLogic will drive combined solutions allowing flexible scaling of compute and storage, while lowering latency, improving workload performance, and reducing acquisition and operating cost for customers.”

The joint solution provides numerous benefits including:
· Up to 2X system performance improvement compared to scale-out DAS based architectures
· Ability to independently scale compute and storage resources to petabyte-class databases and beyond
· Significantly reduced latency for distributed file systems accessing data over an RDMA-enabled fabric—without burdening the compute infrastructure