Excelero hooks up with Broadcom to tag team NVMe over fabrics

Broadcom's NetXtreme BCM57414 20GB/25GB remote direct memory access (RDMA) Ethernet controller card has been validated to work with Excelereo's NVMesh software.

This provides NVMe-over-Fabrics access, using ROCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) from accessing servers to target devices with NVME SSDs. The NetXtreme network interface card (NIC) would be deployed at either side of an Ethernet cable linking the two kinds of system.

The two companies declare that the joint product set has exceptionally low-latency performance, which is suitable for Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics and artificial intelligence applications, as well as web-scale enterprise loads.

If 25 and 50GBitE is not speedy enough, a faster Broadcom NIC is coming, the BCM58800 100Gb so-called Smart NIC system-on-a-chip (SoC). This hasn't been validated yet, although there are heavy hints it will be.

This SoC is said to to deliver breakthrough data plane acceleration and storage performance in a compact form factor. Excelero and Broadcom say that, with it, hyperscale data centre architects will be able to design an OS-agnostic, turnkey storage system running on the SmartNIC, avoiding the need for software installs.

Broadcom and Excelero will showcase their NVMe RDMA Ethernet storage kit at Booth #729 at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, August 8-10. ®