On May 4-8, IT professionals and enterprise developers gathered in Chicago for the 2015 Microsoft Ignite conference. Attendees were given a first-hand glimpse at the future of a variety of Microsoft business solutions through a number of sessions, presentations and workshops.
Of particular note were two demonstrations of RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) technology and the resulting benefits for Windows Server 2016. In both demos, RoCE technology showed significant improvements over Ethernet implementations without RDMA in terms of throughput, latency and processor efficiency.
Below is a summary of each presentation featuring RoCE at Ignite 2015:
Platform Vision and Strategy (4 of 7): Storage Overview
This demonstration highlighted the extreme performance and scalability of Windows Server 2016 through RoCE enabled servers populated with NVMe and SATA SSDs. It simulated application and user workloads using SMB3 servers with Mellanox ConnectX-4 100 GbE RDMA enabled Ethernet adapters, Micron DRAM and enterprise NVMe SSDs for performance and SATA SSDs for capacity.
During the presentation, the use of RoCE compared to TCP/IP showcased drastically different performance. With RDMA enabled, the SMB3 server was able to achieve about twice the throughput, half the latency and around 33 percent less CPU overhead than that attained by TCP/IP.
Check out the video to see the demonstration in action.
Enabling Private Cloud Storage Using Servers with Local Disks
Claus Joergensen, a principal program manager at Microsoft, demonstrated a Windows Server 2016’s Storage Spaces Direct with Mellanox’s ConnectX-3 56Gb/s RoCE with Micron RAM and M500DC local SATA storage.
The goal of the demo was to highlight the value of running RoCE on a system as it related to performance, latency and processor utilization. The system was able to achieve a combined 680,000 4KB IOPS and 2ms latency when RoCE was disabled. With RoCE enabled, the system increased the 4KB IOPS to about 1.1 million and reduced the latency to 1ms. This translated roughly to a 40 percent increase in performance with RoCE enabled, all while utilizing the same amount of CPU resources.
For additional information, watch a recording of the presentation (demonstration starts at 57:00).
For more videos from Ignite 2015, visit Ignite On Demand.