IT Industry Leaders Demo NVMe over Fabrics Performance at Gartner Data Center Conference 2016

Optimizing Low Latency I/O for Enterprise with NVMe-oF: Liqid, Inspur, Mellanox and Kingston

LAS VEGAS--()--Liqid Inc., in partnership with Inspur, one of the top five largest server manufacturers in the world, announces validation of the Liqid Powered Kingston® DCP1000 and 100GbE networking from Mellanox. Validation was performed using two Inspur 1U servers each populated with one of Kingston’s Liqid Powered DCP1000 NVMe solid-state drives (SSD) and connected together through Mellanox’s ConnectX-4 NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) networking adapter.

The results from testing demonstrate industry-leading average write latencies of less than 50 microseconds and high transactional read performance exceeding 1M IOPS per server. The key benefits of these benchmarking metrics enable users to deploy next-generation mission critical scale-out storage applications that require non-blocking architectures for performance-sensitive applications. Customers can now work directly with Inspur on solutions leveraging the latest NVMe-oF technology to accelerate data delivery to applications from the node-, rack- or data center-level using open systems and the latest storage and networking technologies.

“Enterprise customers demand cost-optimized solutions that can accelerate data to any location in their infrastructure while maintaining extreme performance, and they are looking to NVMe to handle the increased storage workloads of cloud, media, IoT and big data analytics,” said Dolly Wu, GM of Data Center and Cloud USA at Inspur Systems. “Sharing data, whether across a data center or campus, while maintaining predictable low latencies is a core requirement for business critical applications. Inspur is looking forward to meeting these challenges with leading suppliers like Kingston and Mellanox.”

Combining Kingston’s Liqid Powered DCP1000 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) with the Mellanox ConnectX® family of network adapters, Inspur’s platforms are able to deliver high performance I/O between servers for distributed, scale-out applications while maintaining extremely low latencies and minimally impacting power requirements. Inspur’s non-blocking NVMe-oF architecture enables nearly 100 percent performance aggregation across NVMe SSDs and allows scaling of network interconnects from 10-100Gbits to meet throughput and IOPS at node- and rack-level deployments.

Using a single DCP1000 SSD and Mellanox NVMe-oF adapter, the Inspur 1U servers (Model: NF5180M4) sustained the following workloads independently:

  • Single-ended NVMe-oF from Sever-1 to Server-2 (used in initiator-target environments)
    • Max Random Read: 1.05 Million IOPS (4k Block, QD = 48)
    • Average Write Latency: 47 microseconds (4k Block, QD=1)
  • Bi-directional NVMe-oF (used in clustered scale-out multi-initiator, multi-target environments)
    • Max Random Read: 1.85 Million IOPS (4k Block, QD = 48)
    • Max Sequential Transfers: 10.2 GBytes per second
    • 42,000 IOPS per watt @ 25 watts of power draw from the DCP1000 SSD

Inspur makes scalable performance and capacity easy by offering customers the choice of Kingston DCP1000 SSDs and Mellanox ConnectX cards on the appropriate Inspur server platform.

“The emerging NVMe over Fabric solution allows mission critical data center applications to access the storage without sacrificing the performance,” said Motti Beck, Sr. Director Enterprise Market Development, Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox continues to enhance its data center Ethernet solutions that include NVMe over Fabric offload engines while pushing the boundaries of throughout and I/O over 25, 40, 50 and 100GbE. We are excited to collaborate with Liqid on Kingston’s Liqid Powered DCP1000 SSD that maximizes I/O requests over RDMA with our ConnectX products.”

“Inspur has won a loyal following across hyperscale and enterprise customers,” said SSD Business Manager Ariel Perez at Kingston. “The DCP1000 was designed from the ground up to meet the performance demands of today’s modern data center, and Kingston looks forward to continuously delivering innovations that allow rapid access to data for our end-users.”

Kingston and Liqid jointly developed the DCP1000 to meet the extreme demands of critical data center and enterprise applications for performance, cost, endurance and power.

“Latency, density and economics are top of mind for CIOs driving toward an agile data center. With the explosion of data volumes feeding real-time analytics, performance leadership at node and rack level is paramount for customers and solution providers alike,” said Marius Tudor, VP Sales and Business Development at Liqid. “NVMe flash and NVMe-oF are becoming increasingly relevant for powering the next wave of data centers to deliver unrivaled performance, efficiencies and economics.”

Industry-leading node- and rack-level NVMe solutions are generally available from Inspur at www.inspursystems.com. Visit Inspur Booth #136 at the Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference in Las Vegas, NV, from Dec. 5-8, 2016, for live performance demonstrations of NVMe-oF with Liqid, Inspur, Mellanox and Kingston technologies.

About Liqid

Liqid is a data center innovation company that develops disruptive system solutions for the bare-metal cloud, enabling hyperscale agility at any scale. Gone are the days of slow, static and capital-intensive infrastructure changes. Liqid OS managed PCIe-based fabrics deliver over 90% resource utilization and 85x better operational efficiency. Liqid delivers a fluid and dynamic approach to disaggregate, provision, create, deploy and delete bare-metal machines and the associated compute, network and storage elements through policy-driven automation and orchestration. This allows organizations to adapt to technological and business changes in real-time, enabling them to fully maximize the opportunities in today’s digital economy. For more information, contact our team at info@liqid.com or visit www.liqid.com. Follow Liqid on TwitterLinkedIn and Google+.

About Inspur

Inspur is a leading global IT total solutions and services provider founded since 1945 with ~26,300 employees worldwide. Inspur is ranked by Gartner as the Top5 largest server manufacturer in the world and Top1 in China. Inspur provides our global customers with data center servers and storage solutions which are Tier1 quality and performance, energy efficient, cost effective, and built specific to actual workloads and data center environments. Inspur is the majority server vendor for Alibaba and Baidu worldwide data centers. As a leader in cloud computing and big data solutions, Inspur is capable of providing total solutions at IaaS, PaaS and SaaS level with high-end servers, mass storage systems, cloud operating systems and information security technology. For more information, visit http://www.inspursystems.com.

About Kingston Digital, Inc.

Kingston Digital, Inc. (“KDI”) is the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Established in 2008, KDI is headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, USA. For more information, please visit www.kingston.com or call 800-337-8410.

About Mellanox

Mellanox Technologies (NASDAQ: MLNX) is a leading supplier of end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand intelligent interconnect solutions and services for servers, storage and hyper-converged infrastructure. Mellanox intelligent interconnect solutions increase data center efficiency by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency, delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance. Mellanox offers a choice of high performance solutions: network and multicore processors, network adapters, switches, cables, software, 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, network security, telecom and financial services. More information is available at www.mellanox.com.

Liqid Inc. and the Liqid Inc. logo are trademarks of Liqid Inc. Copyright 2016, Liqid Inc. All other marks may be the property of their respective titleholders.

Contacts

Liqid Media Contact
Dana Breakstone, 303-500-1551
PR@liqid.com

Release Summary

Liqid, Inspur, Mellanox and Kingston demonstrate industry-leading performance at Gartner 2016 of NVMe over Fabrics using Inspur servers, Mellanox ConnectX-4 and the Liqid Powered Kingston DCP1000.

Contacts

Liqid Media Contact
Dana Breakstone, 303-500-1551
PR@liqid.com