AUSTIN, Texas--BUSINESS WIRE--System Fabric Works SFW, a high-performance software engineering and systems-integration company delivering powerful, open-source fabric and I/O solutions, today announced support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet RoCE as an addition to the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution OFED release 1.5.1 for Linux. RoCE is a new standard announced by the InfiniBand Trade Association.

“With Soft RoCE, SFW offers the opportunity for data center technologists to implement RDMA for their business solutions to improve computing efficiency, simplify infrastructure, and future proof their networks for scaling from 1 to 10 gigabits per second”

SFW is supporting RoCE through a software implementation of RoCE called “Soft RoCE.” With this technology, SFW offers a third mechanism in its OFED release for supporting RDMA over Ethernet: Soft RoCE; a hardware-accelerated chipset directly on Ethernet adapters; and iWARP RDMA over TCP/IP with a hardware offload adapter.

RDMA has long been a mainstay technology in HPC systems for both computing and storage networks, but has required specialized InfiniBand hardware. With this new release, RDMA is easily deployable in data centers and cloud computing environments without any new or specialized Ethernet switches and adapters. SFW’s OFED 1.5.1- rxe is downloadable today at http://SystemFabricWorks.com/solutions/soft_roce.html.

“With Soft RoCE, SFW offers the opportunity for data center technologists to implement RDMA for their business solutions to improve computing efficiency, simplify infrastructure, and future proof their networks for scaling from 1 to 10 gigabits per second,” said Dr. Robert Pearson CEO, CTO and Founder of System Fabric Works. “Soft RoCE achieves multi-million message per second rates, reduces latency over Ethernet vs. TCP/IP, and provides important end-user benefits as well as improving ROI in application software. By supplying Soft RoCE integrated with OFED, SFW is supplying and supporting the full range of OpenFabrics upper-level protocols, with RDMA, on standard Ethernet hardware.”

OFED RDMA maximizes efficient utilization of processor, memory and network resources, and speeds the movement of data among servers and between servers and storage e.g., SAN and NAS. In so doing, OFED RDMA delivers a truly unified network for use in parallel computing, storage I/O, and a host of enterprise applications, such as search, messaging, transaction processing, and virtualization. This yields significant cost savings in energy, floor space and cooling by reducing the hardware servers, power supplies, racks, switches and cables required for high performance, enterprise and cloud computing.

System Fabric Works has been involved since the inception of InfiniBand and the founding of the OpenFabrics Alliance. SFW is a Steering Committee member of The InfiniBand Trade Association, and provides the Executive Director for the OpenFabrics Alliance. Software originally developed by System Fabric Works for its customers has formed integral components of OFED on AIX, Linux, Solaris, Windows and VX Works, including network drivers for Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and other media as well as storage interfaces for block storage SRP and iSCSI and file systems NFS and Lustre. At the recent OpenFabrics Sonoma Workshops, SFW discussed the benefits of InfiniBand-connected storage, the architecture for torus and hypercube networks, and the implementation specifics of Soft RoCE in OFED 1.5.1.

OFED delivers up to ten times the performance of traditional network software at half the hardware cost. RDMA application interfaces on OFED support parallel processing e.g., all major MPIs, sockets and messaging AMQP, SDP and RDS, storage SRP and iSER, files systems NFS, Lustre and databases DB2, Oracle, etc.. Business solutions that leverage OFED range from scientific engineering/modeling, national security, media, communications and data warehousing to financial services, transaction processing and broadband video.

About the System Fabric Works

System Fabric Works “SFW”, headquartered in Austin, TX, specializes in engineering, integration and strategic consulting services to organizations that seek to implement high-performance computing and storage systems, low-latency fabrics and the necessary related software. Derived from its seven years of experience, SFW also offers custom integration and deployment of commodity servers and storage systems at many levels of performance, scale and cost effectiveness that are not available from mainstream suppliers. SFW personnel are widely recognized experts in the fields of high-performance computing, networking and storage systems particularly with respect to OpenFabrics Software, InfiniBand, Ethernet, and energy-saving efficient computing technologies such as RDMA. Detailed information describing SFW’s areas of expertise and corporate capabilities can be found at www.systemfabricworks.com.