Broadcom announced an NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage adapter solution designed to greatly simplify storage disaggregation and accelerate the adoption of storage over fabrics in cloud and enterprise networks.
The solution enables a server to seamlessly connect to a large number of solid-state drives (SSDs) on the network and communicate with these SSDs as if they were local drives. Until now NVMe-oF was only available on servers running recent versions of the Linux operating system, so any server running legacy Linux,
Windows or hypervisors like VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V were not supported. The new Glass Creek adapter provides operating system independence by presenting a standard NVMe interface to the host, extending the reach of NVMe over Fabrics to any server.
“With the introduction of the Glass Creek adapter we are excited to announce a game changing technology that dramatically simplifies storage disaggregation,” said Dan Harding, vice president of marketing for the Compute and Connectivity Division at Broadcom. “Glass Creek takes the NVMe-oF industry another major step forward by providing seamless fabric connectivity to any operating systems while delivering 1M IOPS of performance using standard inbox NVMe drivers.”
Powered by Broadcom’s industry-leading Stingray system on chip (SoC) with hardware accelerators for RAID, De-dupe and security, the 50Gbps Glass Creek adapter delivers breakthrough performance of 1 million IOPS in a standard full-height, half-length (FHHL) PCIe card form factor. Using any inbox NVMe driver, this solution allows customers to easily connect remote disaggregated storage like local storage while reaping the benefits of local NVMe performance, fabrics based scalability, and associated cost efficiency in addition to ease of deployment.
“As we continue to expand presence in the NVMe-oF market with our OpenFlex composable infrastructure, we see Broadcom’s new Stingray-based Glass Creek adapter as a real game changer and believe this will help drive wide spread adoption of NVMe-oF given it can support any operating system environment,” said Scott Hamilton, senior director, product management, Western Digital’s Data Center Systems business unit. “We are excited about our continued collaboration with Broadcom on Stingray and making NVMe-oF a de facto solution for next-generation storage networks.”
