PowerPoint Presentation

Realize Unprecedented Application Performance by Offloading

Compute-Intense Data Communication

Business Benefits

Increase Server

Efficiencies

Sustain near

line rate

bandwidth

Increase CPU

efficiency by

33%

Applications Acceleration with Mellanox

RDMA enabled Networking Solutions

Executive Summary

The expansion of business-critical

information, unstructured data, and rich

content within enterprises continues to

change storage dynamics. This trend is

driving the need for higher connectivity

speeds to keep up with applications

requirement for access to data. In order

to address these market conditions,

Microsoft and Mellanox have joined

forces to solve the storage access

problem by removing CPU overhead and

providing faster and more efficient access

to data for enterprise applications.

Microsoft SMB

The solution comes upon enhances to

Microsoft’s Server Message Block (SMB)

3.0 protocol in Windows Server 2012 R2.

The SMB protocol was extended to

include two new features, SMB Direct,

and SMB Multichannel. SMB Direct

implemented the use of various high-

speed RDMA methods to transfer large

amounts of data with little CPU

intervention. SMB Multichannel allows

file servers to use multiple network

connections simultaneously and provides

fault tolerance through automatic

discovery of network paths to dynamically

add connections as required. The addition

of these two features allows Mellanox

RDMA enabled IO adapters to deliver line-

rate performance and improve availability

by optimizing data transfer between

server and storage over standard

Ethernet. By offering built-in support for

Mellanox RDMA, Microsoft has enabled

customers to deploy storage on low-cost

file servers, while delivering higher

performance. This enables storage

that rivals costly Fibre Channel SANs in

efficiency, with lower latency and

operating cost.

Increasing Server Efficiency

Mellanox ConnectX®-4 Lx EN Ethernet

adapters support RDMA at 10/25/40/50

GbE speeds while the ConnectX®-4

network adapters offer 10/25/40/50 and

100Gb/s Ethernet connectivity and

provide the highest performance and

most flexible solution for high-

performance RDMA implementations.

RDMA provides low latency by removing

processing of the protocol stack for data

transmission from the operating system,

allowing applications to directly read and

write to remote virtual memory and to

directly exchange messages. This

drastically reduces the CPU’s involvement

in data I/O requests and reduces memory

bandwidth bottlenecks. Mellanox RDMA

technologies process all transport

protocol in the adapter hardware,

completely bypassing the host OS. This

permits the adapters to transfer data

between servers and storage with

minimum involvement from the host CPU.

As a result, SMB Direct is extremely fast

with client-to-file server performance,

almost equaling solution that use locally

attached storage. The CPU reduction in

this process leaves more cycles available

for server applications. The result is

larger numbers of hosted VMs per

physical servers, more VDI instances

running simultaneously and SQL

environments achieve high-performance

file sharing to complete queries quicker.

Data Centers efficiencies and scalability

increases in each of these instances.

SOLUTION BRIEF

Achieve over

1 Million

IOPS

Reduce

latencies by

50%

Hyper-V Use Case

The purpose of the use case is to show

the efficiency of the CPU when running

workloads within Hyper-V. The

demonstration utilized two servers, a

client and file server, that were

connected back-to-back with Mellanox

ConnectX®-4 100Gb/s Ethernet adapters

running SMB Direct over RoCE (RDMA

over Converged Ethernet). Three Micron

NVMe SSD 300GB 6G SAS adapters were

used to form an all-SSD storage pool and

IOMeter for the primary I/O generator

and benchmarking tool. To simulate a

real-world environment, different

workload were used to provide data

streams with both static and mixed I/O.

Four cores were allocated to running the

data communication task and the proof of

concept run with and without RoCE

enabled. The results demonstrated that

workloads running on Hyper-V VMs over

RoCE can achieve over 1 million IOPS of

throughput and sustain a near line rate of

100Gbps of aggregate bandwidth without

taxing the CPU. When compared against

the result with RoCE disabled, latency

decreased nearly 50% and CPU efficiency

by more than 33%. The CPU was bound

due to the requirement to process the

data transport protocol; sequence

checking, packet loss recovery, CRC

checking, and passing kernel to user space

transmission. Running the data transport

stack in the CPU steals cycles from

applications and limits overall

productivity. The Mellanox adapter frees

the CPU from this process, delivering

improved efficiencies.

RoCE Advantages

By using Microsoft’s SMB 3.0 over

Mellanox RDMA technologies,

organizations can deliver extremely high

levels of storage performance and

resiliency. RoCE requires very low CPU

utilization and takes advantage of Priority

Flow Control in Data Center Bridging

Ethernet for lossless connectivity.

Configuring Microsoft SMB with Mellanox

RDMA enabled workloads running in

Hyper-V to achieve over 1 million IOPS.

This is not a novel idea, the gaming

industry has been offloading graphic

processing for a long time. And GPU-

accelerated computing has been used to

accelerate scientific, analytics, and

engineering applications since the mid-

2000s. Adding these powerful capabilities

into your arsenal enables a

comprehensive platform that is poised to

tackle the storage demands of the

modern data center.

Figure 1. – Microsoft and Mellanox 100Gb/s cloud efficiency demonstration

For more information:

Download the

Microsoft White Paper

Download a Mellanox

Case Study:

http://www.mellanox.com/related-

docs/case_studies/CS_MHA_Cloud

.pdf

http://www.mellanox.com/related-

docs/case_studies/CS_Financial_In

stitute.pdf

To learn more about

Microsoft SMB visit:

https://technet.microsoft.com/enu

s/library/hh831795(v=ws.11).aspx

More information about the

technology demonstration can

be seen in the Microsoft 2015

Ignite conference presentation

given by Claus Joergensen,

Principal Program Manager,

Microsoft

“Enabling Private Cloud Storage

Using Servers with Local Disks”

SOLUTION BRIEF: Applications Acceleration with Mellanox RDMA enabled Networking Solutions

350 Oakmead Parkway, Suite 100, Sunnyvale, CA 94085

Tel: 408-970-3400 • Fax: 408-970-3403

www.mellanox.com

Mellanox, Mellanox logo, and ConnectX are registered trademarks of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. Mellanox NEO is a trademark of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd.

All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Technology

Demonstration