Cavium's NICs Certified for Microsoft Windows Server SDDC Premium

By Frank Griffin
Contributing Writer

Higher density virtualization, critical workloads and cloud-based architectures are driving the need for high-bandwidth networking infrastructure and faster server solutions. This has led operators to blend physical and virtual infrastructures through software-defined compute, storage, and networking technologies. For Cavium, having its FastLinQ multi-gigabit Ethernet NICs certified by Microsoft (News - Alert) for it Windows Server Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) Premium will allow the company to offer its customers more options when it comes to software-defined solutions. 

The certification from Microsoft is the highest category of SDDC, which gives organizations the ability to leverage the full capabilities of Windows Server 2016 cloud-ready technologies, including Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Storage Spaces Direct, as well as Microsoft Azure Stack with Cavium FastLinQ NICs.

The FastLinQ 45000 Series Intelligent Ethernet Adapters are designed for enterprise-class data centers, public and private clouds, managed service providers (MSPs) and telco deployments. The adapters that are included with the 45000 Series have multi-gigabit Ethernet support from 10 GB to /25/40/50/ and 100Gb.

Arun Mittal, Vice President of Engineering, Cavium, said, “Cavium FastLinQ NIC (News - Alert) delivers hardware offloads for VxLAN overlays, Virtual Machine Multi-Queue (VMMQ) for Hyper-V Virtual Machines, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and Data Center Bridging (DCB) for RDMA, key requirements for SDDC Premium certifications. This achievement further solidifies the key role Cavium FastLinQ NICs play in delivering full software defined capabilities for storage and networking for Windows Server 2016.”

The multi-gigabit Ethernet adapters also feature multi-protocol RDMA, server virtualization with NIC partitioning (NPAR) and single root IO virtualization (SR-IOV), networking tunneling with stateless offload for Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE), Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) and Generic Network Virtulization Encapsulation (GENEVE), and network storage with iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) offloads.

“Software Defined Networking, Storage Spaces Direct and Microsoft Azure Stack are core to Microsoft's strategy to deliver a software-defined hybrid cloud infrastructure. The SDDC Premium certification enables datacenter managers and system integrators deploying Microsoft SDDC technologies to leverage the proven feature set and high-performance capabilities of Cavium Ethernet NICs to build an efficient and reliable hyper-converged datacenter,” said Ravi Rao, Group Manager, Datacenter and Cloud Networking, Windows Server, Microsoft Corp.

With this certification, Cavium's adapters will help operators achieve rapid scale and agility when they adopt a SDN and software-defined storage (SDS) model for deployment and management while meeting operational and security challenges with more efficiency.