The RoCE specification was released back in April, 2010 to address the need for efficient RDMA in end to end Ethernet networks. With the increase in enterprise data traffic and the emergence of hyperscale infrastructure, the need for efficient networking continues to grow.  Here are the latest examples of RoCE in the field.

RoCE Accelerates Microsoft Windows Azure

Albert Greenberg, an architect with IBTA member Microsoft, describes in his keynote address to the Open Network Summit this year how they are using RoCE in their storage offering.  RoCE over 40GbE enabled line-rate performance with zero CPU usage.  At the same time they were able to use less CPUs than would otherwise be needed.

RoCE Used in Dell Fluid Cache for SAN pool

Dell’s Fluid Cache for SAN accelerates applications requiring high data I/O. The servers in this pool are connected to each other by RoCE NICs, making use of the technology to quickly move data between the nodes without facing bottlenecks from the slow operating system kernel.

RoCE Can Do What Ethernet Alone Cannot

IBTA member Applied Micro is continuing to roll out its X-Gene family of 64-bit processors. These processors support RoCE, giving 10GbE some of the low-latency capabilities that used to only be available to InfiniBand. The decrease in latency for Ethernet means transaction latencies also decrease, better positioning the X-Gene family to make a difference in modern workloads.

RoCE Provides Exceptional Performance for Storage Solutions

Zadara Storage announced a new high performance STaaS solution offer for private clouds that uses an Ethernet transport mechanism for exceptional performance at reduced costs. Developed as a collaboration with IBTA member Mellanox Technologies, this solution boosts application performance using the iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER) over RoCE, delivering substantially improved latency and throughput and therefore delivering cost savings and converged enterprise storage for private clouds of all sizes.

RoCE Helps Data Centers Account for New Technology for the Cloud

With the huge acceleration of data centers to the cloud, low latency is becoming increasingly important to avoid bottlenecks and incorporate new technologies seamlessly. RoCE, says SYS-CON Media’s Barbara Porter, is one way to plan for the barrage of new technology that’s coming our way, and to reduce latency overall in the cloud.