Inventec Brings on the Thunder with Baymax
By Inventec, the world’s largest ODM server manufacturer, has come out with a new server platform based on the new Cavium Inc. 64-bit ARMv8 ThunderX2 technology.
The Inventec solution is called Baymax. It’s optimized for big data, cloud computer, and high-performance cloud storage. And it’s compliant with the OCP Project Olympus effort.
This 1U rack mount platform supports two ThunderX2 SoCs in a dual socket configuration. It offers up to 1.5TB of DDR4 memory. It has three PCIe x16 slots, four SATA ports, and four M.2 flash for local storage. And it is optimized for diverse workloads like Hadoop, SQL, and more.
Baymax is based on Cavium’s second generation 64-bit ARMv8 ThunderX2 technology. That technology includes multiple workload optimized SKUs for scale up and scale out applications. And it’s compliant with ARMv8-A, ARM SBSA, and SBBR.
Speaking of Cavium, NVMe over Fabric is another technology on which the company has been working. Earlier this month, Cavium announced that its family of QLogic Gen 6 Fibre Channel and FastLinQ Ethernet adapters will support NVMe over Fabrics technology.
In a recent interview, Greg Scherer, CTO for Ethernet and fiber channel adapters at Cavium, explained that NVMe over Fabrics is a new technology that is magnitude faster than rotating disc storage. And, he said, it marks a complete sea change in terms of the accessibility of data.
Today, NVMe disc drives are embedded inside servers, he added. But that leaves storage on a kind of island, he said, because no one can get to that storage if the server goes down. So the first application of this technology, he explained, is just putting the storage out on the network so it is more accessible.
“NVMe over Fabric technologies are unlocking the value of data by delivering a low latency, scalable, secure and proven fabric to extend the reach of NVMe across a large scale fabric,” said Cavium COO Raghib Hussain. “Cavium QLogic Fibre Channel and FastLinQ Ethernet Universal RDMA solutions for NVMe deliver the ultimate choice to customers looking to bring the performance and economics of NVMe to enterprise and cloud data centers.”
