Marvell enables NVMe over Fabrics storage disaggregation for VMware

Marvell’s QLogic Fibre Channel and FastLinQ Ethernet adapters are now supporting NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) technology in VMware vSphere 7.0.

This enables high-performance NVMe flash storage to be effectively shared, pooled and managed across a fabric.

Specifically, Marvell FastLinQ 41000 and 45000 Series Ethernet Adapters support NVMe/RDMA over both RoCEv2 and iWARP protocols. Starting with VMware vSphere 7.0, customers can leverage NVMe/RoCEv2 capabilities of FastLinQ NICs while future-proofing their data centers for potential use cases of NVMe/iWARP and NVMe/TCP. FastLinQ Universal RDMA capability, combined with future support for NVMe over TCP, provides IT managers with the broadest choice of options to scale out NVMe.

“NVMe over Fabric technologies are unlocking the value of NVMe flash by delivering a variety of low latency, scalable and trusted fabrics,” said Vikram Karvat, vice president and general manager, Server Connectivity Business Unit at Marvell. “The introduction of Marvell’s QLogic FC-NVMe and FastLinQ NVMe/RoCEv2 technologies into industry-leading virtualization platforms from VMware enables end users to leverage economies of scale when deploying NVMe without compromising the performance, reliability or manageability of their infrastructure.”

“VMware and Marvell solutions have been an integral part of every wave of virtualization and storage innovation in the data center for several years,” said Sudhanshu Jain, director of product management, Cloud Platform, VMware. “Marvell’s QLogic FC and FastLinQ Ethernet technology with vSphere 7.0 enables customers to leverage existing SAN infrastructure and migrate to FC-NVMe to take advantage of performance and cost matrix.”