How OpenPOWER Members Created the World’s First Production-ready PCIe Gen4 NVM Express System
Published on Wednesday 21 March 2018
What is NVM Express (NVMe)?
NVMe is a new and increasingly popular protocol for interfacing with Solid State Drives (SSDs) in enterprise, data-center and HPC markets. NVMe has a broad eco-system that is capable of running on OpenPOWER systems.
How it works: NVMe uses PCIe to connect the CPU to the SSDs. Eideticom deployed its NVMe-based accelerator, NoLoad™ product on top of Xilinx’s FPGA technology on a production ready FPGA acceleration card. The acceleration card ran inside a production ready OpenPOWER server from Rackspace, thus creating the world’s first PCIe Gen4 NVM Express production ready system.
IBM’s POWER9 is the first production CPU with PCIe Gen4 IO. Because of this, the data bandwidth is nearly doubled compared to the PCIe Gen3.
“We are excited to incorporate Eideticom’s storage acceleration and PCIe Gen4 technology in our Barreleye G2 server,” said Adi Gangidi, system design engineer at Rackspace. “Accelerator IP enablers like Eideticom are helping drive the widespread data center adoption of a new and unmatched class of IO.”
What OpenPOWER members collaborated on this project?
Eideticom, IBM, Rackspace and Xilinx worked together to create the world’s first PCI Gen4 NVM Express production ready system. This collaboration enabled a new generation of storage performance for the OpenPOWER eco-system based on open standards at PCIe Gen4 speeds.
“The OpenPOWER Foundation has been aggressively adopting PCIe Gen4 because we see the need for faster storage, network and compute” said Bryan Talik, President of the OpenPOWER Foundation “OpenPOWER has already demonstrated PCIe Gen4 support with IBM, Mellanox, and Xilinx and we are delighted that Eideticom can now offer fast storage and compute via NVMe over that PCIe Gen4 ecosystem.”
Click here for more information on the world’s first PCI Gen4 NVM Express production ready system.
