The RoCE Initiative
Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is a critical technology at the heart of the fastest supercomputers and many of the largest data centers in the world. It has expanded into enterprise markets and is now being widely adopted over Ethernet networks.
RDMA over Converged Ethernet or RoCE (pronounced “rocky”) is driving an advanced data center architecture that eliminates dedicated storage area networks and converges compute, networking and storage onto a single fabric. Leveraging the latest advances in reliable Ethernet and Data Center Bridging (DCB), efficient RDMA mechanisms in RoCE provide lower CPU overhead and increase mainstream data center application performance over Layer 2 and Layer 3 fabrics at all of today’s Ethernet speeds and beyond.
Data center architects running RDMA applications on an Ethernet infrastructure can expect to see application performance and efficiency improvements that come from the offloading of data movement and the higher availability of CPU resources to the application. Higher server productivity reduces the need for additional servers creating cost and power savings.
RoCE adopters can make use of RDMA’s capabilities without leaving the familiar transport and network management system of Ethernet. In this way, adopters are able to upgrade their application performance without investing in alternative switching interconnect technologies.
For additional information on RoCE, visit the RoCE Initiative website.