Mellanox Releases Open Source Code for "Soft-RoCE" to Accelerate Enterprise Deployments of RDMA

From Mellanox:


June 23, 2015
Mellanox Releases Open Source Code for "Soft-RoCE" to Accelerate Enterprise Deployments of RDMA
Software RoCE enables RDMA technology over any Ethernet adapter; furthers the adoption of RDMA in the data center, Web 2.0, and cloud infrastructures

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Red Hat Summit - Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ:MLNX), a leading supplier of end-to-end interconnect solutions for servers and storage systems and a RoCE Initiative supporter, today announced the release of "Soft-RoCE" - a software-implementation of RDMA Over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). Resulting from a joint development effort with IBM and System Fabric Works, the freely-available software implementation of RoCE enables servers and storage systems to communicate with RDMA using any industry-standard Ethernet adapter. Soft-RoCE enables full interoperability between industry-standard NICs and hardware accelerated solutions, providing businesses with the ability to use RDMA technology across their entire data center infrastructure.

The open source software supports the RoCE Initiative within the InfiniBand Trade Association, which promotes multi-vendor RDMA over Ethernet solutions for cloud and enterprise data centers. Providing Soft-RoCE freely for Ethernet networks and interconnects accelerates the adoption of RDMA across a wide range of applications and environments. Soft-RoCE code is available now at https://github.com/SoftRoCE.

"RDMA is becoming an increasingly important technology in the enablement of cloud-scale high-performance data center networks," said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. "Simultaneously, these data center operators are embracing open source software-defined networking and storage. Soft-RoCE combines both of these factors, furthering efficiencies and performance improvements in data center network infrastructures."

"The Mellanox ConnectX® family of 10/25/40/50 and 100GbE adapter cards, include full RoCE hardware offloads, and are the world's most widely deployed adapters supporting RDMA today," said Michael Kagan, CTO of Mellanox Technologies. "These adapters offer world class performance capable of scaling to 100,000s of nodes for cloud, Web 2.0, Big Data, and storage applications. Soft-RoCE allows the protocol to become ubiquitous and available on any server with an Ethernet connection. Communication with a Soft-RoCE client allows storage and appliance vendors to showcase the performance, scalability, and efficiency benefits of hardware accelerated RoCE used in their platforms."

Systems supporting hardware-accelerated RoCE adapters—such as the Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro—are already available from Dell, HP, Lenovo, IBM, Quanta, Supermicro, and other major server and storage manufacturers. Adapters supporting RoCE hardware acceleration will soon be available from other vendors.

"Canonical, the market leader in scale out and OpenStack production environments, is pleased to have Mellanox as a Ubuntu Cloud partner to enable new network and data center models," said John Zannos, vice president alliances and ecosystem, Canonical. "Accelerating network data in an OpenStack environment is important to customer deployments. Bringing Soft-RoCE capability to any Ethernet adapter shows Mellanox leadership in utilizing open source for production networks. We are pleased to see Soft-RoCE availability in Ubuntu today and look forward to even tighter integration in the future."

Supporting Resources:

Learn more about ConnectX-3 Pro.
Learn more about RoCE and the RoCE Initiative at www.roceinitiative.org
Learn more about Mellanox products and solutions at www.mellanox.com.
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About Mellanox

Mellanox Technologies is a leading supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage. Mellanox interconnect solutions increase data center efficiency by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency, delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance capability. Mellanox offers a choice of fast interconnect products: adapters, switches, software, cables and silicon that accelerate application runtime and maximize business results for a wide range of markets including high-performance computing, enterprise data centers, Web 2.0, cloud, storage and financial services. More information is available at www.mellanox.com.