EDITORIAL CONTACT:
Alex Plant
Burson-Marsteller
415-591-4034
alex_plant@bm.com
RDMA CONSORTIUM COMPLETES ALL PLANNED
SPECIFICATIONS
October 31, 2003 – The RDMA Consortium today announced completion of all planned specifications relating to the RDMA protocol suite. The RDMA protocol suite provides more efficient and scalable computing while leveraging existing, industry-standard Ethernet infrastructures. Since the RDMA protocol can place data directly into its final memory destination, system processors and memory are freed up for user applications. With the improved efficiency and performance of RDMA-enabled NICs (RNICs), applications are better able to scale by sharing tasks across the network as opposed to centralizing work in larger, more expensive systems. More efficient networking also offers the opportunity to converge functions in the data center over fewer types of interconnects.
Finalizing
versions 1.0 of the iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER) Protocol and Sockets
Direct Protocol (SDP) specifications moves the focus
of RDMA efforts to first-generation industry implementations of RDMA over TCP
solutions. The iSER specification
defines extensions to the data transfer model of iSCSI, a storage networking
standard for TCP/IP, to allow iSCSI devices to take advantage of the performance
benefits of RDMA, while utilizing the existing iSCSI infrastructure. These extensions use the Datamover
Architecture for iSCSI (DA) specification for movement of data between
iSCSI end nodes.
SDP allows existing internet applications to take advantage
of the performance benefits of RDMA without application modification. The SDP specification describes how to map
existing internet applications, which typically use TCP sockets, onto a RDMA
network. This allows RDMA hardware to
be used by existing internet applications and enables protocol offload, kernel
bypass, and zero copy capabilities. Additional information about the iSER, DA and
SDP specifications, and the overall benefits of RDMA, is available at
www.rdmaconsortium.org.
The completed iSER and SDP specifications accompany the RDMA wire-protocol suite, which was completed in October 2002 and the Verbs specification which was completed in April 2003. The delivery of iSER, SDP, the RDMA wire-protocol suite and the Verbs Specifications complete the family of protocols necessary to enable deployment of RDMA based networking, Inter-Process Communication (IPC), and storage infrastructures. The specifications are suitable for first-generation industry implementations of RDMA over TCP solutions and complete the information required for RDMA infrastructure development.
The RDMA Consortium member companies and
individuals are active participants in the IETF process and will continue
working within the IETF on RDMA protocol specifications. The consortium
members will continue to address Errata for the RDMA Consortium specifications.
Founded by Adaptec, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT), Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), HP (NYSE: HPQ), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Network Appliance, Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP), the RDMA Consortium is an independent consortium formed to develop the architectural specifications necessary to implement products that provide RDMA over TCP/IP networks, including Ethernet-based networks. These specifications will help organizations meet increasing demands for networking bandwidth and speed that are currently growing faster than the processing power and memory bandwidth of the compute nodes that process networking traffic.
About
the RDMA Consortium
The
RDMA Consortium is an open industry forum chartered to develop architectural
specifications necessary to implement products that provide RDMA technology
over TCP/IP. Additional information
about the RDMA Consortium, membership information, contacts for founding
companies and other materials can be found at
http://www.rdmaconsortium.org.
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