Cavium has announced broad support for Microsoft Windows Server 2016. Cavium's QLogic portfolio of Ethernet and Fibre Channel adapters are now fully qualified for Microsoft Windows Server 2016, enabling key public, private and hybrid cloud capabilities, that allow IT functions to adapt rapidly to changing business requirements.
Windows Server 2016, Microsoft's cloud-ready server operating system, delivers new levels of security, performance, resiliency and cost efficiency, enabling organizations to innovate faster to compete effectively. QLogic's broad I/O connectivity portfolio of FastLinQ™ 10/25/40/50/100GbE Ethernet Adapters and Enhanced Gen 5 (16GFC) and Gen 6 (32GFC) Fibre Channel Adapters bring forth a new generation of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Storage (SDS) capabilities with Windows Server 2016 for applications and infrastructure, accelerating their journey to the cloud.
"RDMA is key to Microsoft's strategy for a software defined hybrid cloud infrastructure based on Windows Server 2016, QLogic FastLinQ Ethernet adapters deliver a rich feature set including Routable RDMA capabilities and great Ethernet performance as well – enabling customers to leverage Microsoft technologies like Hyper-V, SMB Direct and Storage Spaces Direct in their journey to build a secure, efficient and hyper-converged datacenter," said Ravi Rao, Principal PM Manager, Windows Server, Microsoft Corp.
With Windows Server 2016, QLogic FastLinQ Ethernet Adapters deliver key networking features used in the Azure datacenters for performance, agility and availability, including:
- Application Acceleration with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA): The QLogic 45000 Series of Ethernet adapter is the only family that supports Universal-RDMA technology, including RoCE and RoCEv2, and capable of iWARP. This provides a RDMA technology choice to customers and enables applications and infrastructure to leverage Windows Server 2016 technologies like SMB Direct and High Performance Live Migration over RDMA, accelerating storage workloads while reducing server CPU utilization.
- High Performance, Scalable Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: With support and acceleration for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), QLogic 45000 Series of Ethernet adapters enable customers to build highly available and scalable software-defined storage (SDS) solutions using standard servers with local storage, bringing the affordability and scalability of the cloud to private and hybrid cloud deployments.
- Network Acceleration for Virtual Machines: With support for Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Virtual Machine Multi Queue (VMMQ) technology, QLogic 45000 Series Network Adapters enable near linear scalability in performance of Hyper-V virtualized workloads by scaling the network performance across multiple virtual compute resources. In addition, QLogic FastLinQ 45000 Series Adapters deliver acceleration for Hyper-V Network Virtualization (HNV) workloads by offloading protocol processing for VxLAN and NVGRE, enabling customers to build and scale virtualized networks without impacting network performance.
