I recently had the opportunity to have a call with Julie Herd about what E8 Storage have been up to and thought I’d share my thoughts here. I’ll admit it was a very quick chat because the announcement needed little explanation, but it’s sometimes the simple things that are worth noting.

Announcement

E8 Storage recently announced availability of InfiniBand support for its high performance, NVMe storage solutions. They already do NVMe/F using 4 or 8 100GbE ports, and there’s now an equivalent offering using IB.

Thoughts and Further Reading

E8 are positioning this primarily as a response to requirements from HPC customers. While some people think IB is dead, there has been a big investment in the technology in HPC environments, and this allows E8 to get into that market without upsetting the apple cart too much. They’re certainly delivering the kind of storage performance that HPC folks would be interested in, so this seems like a sensible solution. They tell me there’s no difference in terms of latency or performance between the IB and RoCE offerings, and it’s really just about a common transport for those users that need it. The cool thing about E8, of course, is that there’s also a software-only version of their offering available, in case you have a particular tin vendor that you’d like to build your super fast NVMe/F storage platform on. You can read the full announcement here.