ACADEMIA

Mellanox Technologies has announced that its RDMA technology for InfiniBand and Ethernet is supported in the Windows Server “8” Beta release, delivering leading application performance and efficiency for file system, database and enterprise data centers. Preliminary benchmark results performed by Mellanox and Microsoft Corp. demonstrate up to 5X faster application performance using Mellanox InfiniBand compared to non-RDMA-based 10Gb/s solutions. Windows Server “8” beta, with the Mellanox software drivers, is available for download from Microsoft at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh708764 .

The new performance results were enabled by the new SMB Direct protocol that was developed by Microsoft, which takes advantage of Mellanox RDMA technology, and is part of the SMB2.2 (Server Message Block) implementation. Microsoft SMB Direct is the foundation for file system solutions, including SQL Server, cloud and Web 2.0 environments. With Windows Server “8” Beta and Mellanox’s RDMA-based InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnects, users can complete jobs faster at reduced operational expenses and lower capital investment. In addition, users can now build a virtualized Windows Server Hyper-V based data center that supports higher scalability while maximizing the number of virtual machines, resulting in lower total cost-of-ownership.

“A highlight of Windows Server ‘8’ is its great improvement in storage performance, as demonstrated by the preliminary benchmark results that SMB Direct has achieved,” said Mike Schutz, Senior Director, Windows Server and Virtualization, at Microsoft. “With this new technology, customers can access storage over the network at the speed of local storage. As a result, a virtualized server infrastructure can utilize shared JBOD storage through the use of RDMA-enabled network interface cards (RNICs). This approach significantly increases data center efficiency.”

“We would like to congratulate Microsoft on achieving the significant Windows Server “8” Beta release milestone and are proud to have our drivers in-box,” said David Barzilai, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “These benchmark results validate the application performance boost that our RDMA-enabled interconnect solutions deliver. End-users will now be able to benefit from the application acceleration gains and the high efficiency the solution delivers.”

Supporting Resources:

• Learn more about Mellanox’s complete FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand solution
• Learn more about Mellanox’s complete 40GbE solution
• Follow Mellanox on Twitter and Facebook