New InfiniBand RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) Spec for the Data Center

The InfiniBand Trade Association has released a new specification called RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), pronounced "Rocky", for bringing the power of the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) I/O architecture to Ethernet-based business solutions. Products based on RoCE will reach the market during the coming year.


RDMA and low latency clustering has dominated the high performance computing space. Low latency and RDMA capabilities in data center fabrics enable end-users to achieve significantly higher and deterministic transaction rates while increasing the efficiency of clustered servers and storage systems and reducing energy consumption.


The new RoCO spec defines a "one fat pipe" approach to server I/O and gives the user great flexibility in deploying applications. RoCE is implemented in and downloadable today in the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) 1.5.1. Many Linux distributions, which include OFED, support a wide and rich range of middleware and application solutions such as IPC, sockets, messaging, virtualization, SAN, NAS, file systems and databases. RoCE can therefore deliver all three dimensions of unified networking on Ethernet -- IPC, NAS and SAN.
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