Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO) today 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.

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.

Key Features and Benefits

• Standard NVMe host driver on any operating system expanding NVMe-oF to 100% of storage market
• NVMe physical function (PF) and 64 NVMe virtual functions (VF) for deployment in bare metal and virtualized servers
• 50Gbps Ethernet bandwidth and 1M random read IOPS
• Hardware acceleration for RAID, De-dupe and storage encryption
• Supports RoCE and NVMe/TCP for use in any standard Ethernet network
• Octal Arm A72 cores @ 3GHz providing best-in-class Arm CPU performance
• x8 FHHL industry standard PCIe adapter
• 2x25G Ethernet ports

“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.”

Demo Showcase at 2019 Flash Memory Summit

Broadcom will showcase its latest Glass Creek NVMe-oF adapter solution connecting a host server to NVMe-oF based target system via standard NVMe protocol, delivering 1 million storage IOPS. The demonstration will be in Broadcom’s private meeting room at the 2019 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California from August 6^th to 8^th. Please contact us to schedule a demonstration.

Availability

Broadcom is now sampling its Glass Creek NVMe-oF adapter to qualified customers supporting 2x25G Ethernet interface. Please contact your local Broadcom sales representative for samples and pricing.

Further information on Broadcom’s Stingray BCM58800 SoC processor can be found online at: https://www.broadcom.com/products/ethernet-connectivity/controllers/bcm58800