Efficient, cost-effective transport is ideal for rich communication services, high-speed clustering and storage connectivity

SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 19 -- The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA), an industry consortium delivering powerful, open-source I/O solutions, today announced support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). RoCE is a new standard announced today by the InfiniBand Trade Association. OFA is supporting this new capability in the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) release 1.5.1 for Linux.

With this release, OFED now offers two mechanisms for supporting RDMA over Ethernet. iWARP supports RDMA over a conventional TCP/IP network, while RoCE supports RDMA directly on Ethernet. OFED RDMA has long been a mainstay technology in HPC systems for both computing and storage networks. With this new release, RDMA is easily deployable in datacenters and cloud computing environments. OFED 1.5.1 is downloadable today at www.OpenFabrics.org.

RoCE, focusing on efficient utilization of processor, memory and network resources, speeds the movement of data among servers and between servers and storage (i.e., SAN and NAS). In so doing, it delivers a truly unified network for use in parallel computing (MPI), storage, and a host of enterprise applications, such as search, messaging, transaction processing, and virtualization. This yields significant cost savings in energy, floor space and cooling by reducing the hardware (e.g., servers, power supplies, racks, switches and cables) required for high-performance, enterprise and cloud computing.

"With RoCE, OFED further reduces latency over Ethernet, providing important end-user benefits, such as maximizing application performance, reducing operating costs, and improving return on investment. OFED provides a single, cost-effective unifying path for RDMA as fabrics and networks scale from 1 to 10 to 40 gigabit speeds," said Bill Boas, executive director of the OpenFabrics Alliance. "Customers have characterized their savings with OFED as ten times the performance for half the hardware cost of traditional networking. Now customers can obtain the benefits of RDMA and the rich application interfaces OFED supports using either Ethernet, InfiniBand or any other network interconnect that supports OFED."

RDMA is a proven technology in HPC as evidenced by the recent TOP500 supercomputer list where many sites are using InfiniBand. TCP/IP/Ethernet, on the other hand, is deployed in nearly every enterprise datacenter worldwide. By integrating proven RDMA technologies with well-known Ethernet, RoCE and iWARP can help the adoption of RDMA in datacenters. OFED now offers three distinct forms of RDMA (iWARP, RoCE and InfiniBand) to improve performance, enhance efficiency, cut costs, increase IT flexibility and simplify operations.

At the recent OpenFabrics Alliance Workshop in Sonoma, Chelsio, Cisco, DDN, HP, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Microsoft, Oracle, QLogic, SGI, Voltaire and others shared their experiences with delivering OFED to their HPC and enterprise customers for parallel computing and storage systems. Discussions with leaders in high-speed messaging, virtualization and cloud computing from suppliers such as Eucalyptus, Novell, NYSE Technologies, Red Hat, and Xsigo revealed that OFED RDMA speeds up the delivery of business information, improves the profitability of decisions and enhances the reliability and security of contemporary virtual infrastructures by unifying network technologies.

OFED is designed to optimize server-to-server and server-to-storage connectivity with high availability and flexible network topologies. OFED is already delivering up to ten times the performance of traditional network software at half the hardware cost. RDMA application interfaces on OFED support parallel processing (all major MPIs), sockets and messaging (AMQP, SDP and RDS), storage (SRP and iSER), files systems (NFS, Lustre) and databases (DB2, Oracle, etc.). Business solutions that leverage OFED range from scientific engineering/modeling, national security, media, communications and data warehousing to financial services, transaction processing and broadband video.

About the OpenFabrics Alliance

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is a 501(c)(6) non-profit association that develops, tests, licenses and distributes the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) -- cross-platform, open-source software for high-performance, low-latency and energy-efficient computing. OFED is used in business, research and scientific environments that require fast and efficient networks, storage connectivity and parallel computing. OFED is free and is included in major Linux distributions as well as Microsoft Windows. In addition to distributing OFED, the OFA conducts interoperability testing to ensure all releases meet multi-vendor enterprise requirements for security, usability and reliability. For more information about OFA, visit www.OpenFabrics.org.

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Source: The OpenFabrics Alliance