Toshiba Memory Releases TCP Transport Support for KumoScale Shared Accelerated Storage Software

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 12, 2019 – Toshiba Memory America, Inc., the U.S.-based subsidiary of Toshiba Memory Corporation, today announced that its KumoScale™ shared accelerated storage software now supports TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) transport in its 3.9 production release, available today. By leveraging TCP, the most widely used and trusted networking protocol in today’s enterprise and cloud data centers, KumoScale software enables NVM Express™ over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) to be deployed over existing Ethernet networks, opening opportunities for broader NVMe-oF deployment and adoption. In addition to TCP networks, KumoScale supports RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) version 2 networks.

KumoScale shared accelerated storage software makes flash storage accessible over a data center network. It addresses the inefficiencies associated with direct-attached storage (DAS) architectures by disaggregating the high-performance NVMe SSDs from compute nodes and making them shared and available across a network infrastructure as network-attached resources. Pooling these resources provides the ability to provision the right amount of storage or compute for each application workload, on each server within the data center, all while preserving the high-performance and low-latency benefits of NVMe™ SSDs.  By delivering disaggregated, highly-flexible networked block storage to compute nodes, KumoScale allows data centers to run more efficiently.

“Today’s current NVMe over Fabric options clearly open up the opportunity to share high-performance, solid-state storage much more efficiently but have required custom hardware and/or software on the server-side to enable it,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group at IDC.  “The importance of NVMe over Fabric using TCP as a transport will be critical to the mainstreaming of shared NVMe storage in general, however, because it works out-of-the-box with the standard Ethernet adapters and TCP stack that already ship with most industry-standard servers – no custom content is required. This offers an NVMe over Fabric solution that is easier to deploy, costs less than other options and is simpler to maintain over time.”

"NVMe-oF technology is rapidly changing the way cloud and enterprise data centers connect to shared storage,” said Vikram Karvat, vice president and general manager of Server Connectivity Business Unit at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc.  “NVMe/TCP is designed to layer over any standard IP network with excellent performance and latency characteristics while delivering compelling flexibility and scale. Marvell provides one of the industry’s most diverse portfolio of fabrics for scaling out NVMe, including TCP, RoCE, iWARP and FC-NVMe.”

At Flash Memory Summit 2018, Toshiba Memory’s KumoScale storage software and Marvell^® FastLinQ^® 100GbE network interface card (NIC) received a ‘Best of Show’ award as the ‘Most Innovative Memory Technology in Storage Networking’ for their joint demonstration of NVMe-oF TCP. The solution leverages existing Ethernet networks for investment protection and enables disaggregated and virtualized storage for any NVMe SSD.

“TCP promises to open the market for NVMe-oF by not only delivering low-latency networked storage, but also by enabling large-scale data centers to utilize their existing and ubiquitous Ethernet infrastructure,” said Steve Pope, co-founder and CTO at SolarFlare.  “NVMe-over-TCP using Ethernet delivers the same high bandwidth, low-latency performance as that of iWARP or RoCE but without the pain, and will work with the majority of the one hundred million Ethernet ports that are shipped into data centers each year. At SolarFlare, we are committed to accelerating NVMe-oF TCP while maintaining compliance to the NVMe specification.”

Toshiba Memory is a leading provider of NVMe SSDs, technology and software. For more information, please visit storage.toshiba.com/kumoscale.

About Toshiba Memory America, Inc.
Toshiba Memory America, Inc. is the U.S.-based subsidiary of Toshiba Memory Corporation, a leading worldwide supplier of flash memory and solid state drives (SSDs).  From the invention of flash memory to today’s breakthrough 96-layer BiCS FLASH™ TLC (3-bit-per-cell) 3D flash memory technology, Toshiba continues to lead innovation and move the industry forward.  For more information on Toshiba Memory, please visit business.toshiba-memory.com and follow us on social media.