Gigabyte S260-NF0 Storage Server

Description

The Gigabyte S260-NF0 Storage Server is ideal for a composable resource infrastructure providing up to 16m Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS) at full capacity with both controller modules outfitted with 3x NVMe Over Fabric (NVMeOF) adapter cards. This platform brings the reliability and speed of NVMe storage to anywhere in the datacenter with remote direct memory access (RMDA). While NVMe storage uses the PCIe bus to transmit data it is inherently not designed for expansion outside of the box. This is true for direct attached storage as well in regard to sharing flash storage among multiple servers. As a result, this medium can be underutilized. NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeOF) sidesteps this shortcoming by enabling NVMe-based communication over the interconnects or fabrics with an HBA card that transmits data to the rest of the network through an RDMA connection to the network, which can then be routed to external compute nodes using high-bandwidth network controllers and switches.

Performance

This system features an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) specifically designed for data extraction from the PCIe bus to distribute to the rest of the network via a host bus adapter present in each of the controller modules. there are two modules each with a single Western Digital Onyx NVMeOF bridge ASIC to distribute resources, in this case flash storage, to the rest of the network.

Memory

There is no memory on either of the two controller modules supported on this system. Instead, the ASIC NVMeOF controllers pull data stored on NVMe drives through the PCIe bus using PCIe switches. Data is then shared with the rest of the network.

Storage

24x NVMe drive bays on the front of the Gigabyte S260-NF0 Storage Server are split between the two controller modules, each of which has a Western Digital Onyx NVMeOF Bridge ASIC. The data streams through a PCIe switch to the ASIC and then through a host bus adapter card. Each controller is in charge of 12x drive bays with PCIe 3.0 x4 bandwidth per port.

Expansion

With 3x PCIe 3.0 x16 expansion slots per controller node, Administrators can install up to 3x Western Digital Onyx NVMe Host Bus Adapters per node. The system comes with a single WDC HBA card per node for up to 2.5M random reads and 2M random write IOPS per NVMeOF adapter card. With all three slots outfitted with NVMeOF adapter cards, the system is capable of 16M IOPS offering an ideal solution for a composable resource infrastructure. The adapter card itself offers a system on a chip (SoC) design with 4x cores and 10MB of memory, plus a network connection supporting a single 100GB or dual 50GB, 25GB or 10GB connectivity. The system supports iWARP (not an acronym) and RoCE v1 and v2 (RMDA over Converged Ethernet) bypassing the CPU, need for caching data or the interaction with an OS.

Management

A single RJ45 mLAN port on the back of the system provides access to the integrated ASPEED AST 2520 baseboard management controller (BMC). This provides for remote access to the system which is IPMI 2.0 compatible.

Summary

By providing access to NVMe drives, the Gigabyte S260-NF0 Storage Server delivers fast and reliable data transmission to the rest of the network. Through an RMDA architecture, o the server nodes distributed throughout the datacenter can access the system storage ensuring underutilized assets are accessible throughout the network.