The platform by AIC’s products provides a reliable and high-performance storage solution. The 2U 24-Bay server supports dual-port NVMe SSDs (U.2) with dual controllers support "active/active" operation for instant failover between controller nodes. The platform includes support for 10 GbE, PCIe NTB or SAS communications options. Each controller node supports up to two Intel Xeon Processors from the E5-2600 v4 product family. With equipped battery backup and hot-swappable components, system downtime is kept to a minimum even in the event of failure or scheduled maintenance, thereby increasing system availability and delivering substantial savings for system management staff.

Deployed on AIC’s 2U 24-Bay server, E8 Storage’s patented software architecture unlocks the full performance of NVMe drives without sacrificing reliability or availability – features that are critical to enterprise IT data centers. The E8-D24 centralized NVMe storage solution provides the economic and architectural advantages of centralized storage to deliver the high I/O and low latency advantages of PCIe NVMe SSDs.

Enterprises benefit from the increased capacity utilization of a centralized solution, avoiding the islands of underutilized storage when deploying local SSDs inside of compute servers. This would also save money by eliminating the need to pre-allocate server capacity for future use at today’s higher prices.

“E8 Storage looks for hardware partners that can meet our stringent availability and reliability requirements for our system architecture. AIC’s server products are a strong fit for us, and they have been a strategic partner to E8 Storage during the development of our products,” said Zivan Ori, CEO and Co-Founder of E8 Storage. “We are pleased with the early success of E8 Storage and with the strong support of our partner, AIC.”

The Intel DC D3700 series dual-port NVMe combined with the E8 Storage HA NVMe Solution achieves NVMe shared storage. Intel DC D3700 Series are very special SSDs to address dual-port PCI Express SSDs High-Availability design. This architecture is used to address a critical redundancy and failover, protecting against to a single path failure. That means that the SSD has a capability to be connected to two hosts at a time, they can be connected directly to a host CPU or via PCIe switch topology if higher SSD count is required.

Intel DC D3700 Series SSDs are based on NVMe 1.2 specification, which introduces new features for all NVMe SSDs. The one of those is multiple Namespace support. You can make here an analogy with SCSI LUNs, so a single SSD can be partitioned into multiple hardware partitions where a namespace can be assigned to two hosts or otherwise dedicated to a single host. And this allows isolating the partition from another host until a critical failure on assigned host happened.

The distributed architecture and software stack allow the customer to achieve full NVMe performance of their remote drives (both throughput and bandwidth) and with minimal impact on NVMe latency (as compared to local NVMe drive usage). The high-performance storage solution scales with capacity while maintaining the same level of performance expected from local storage inside the servers. The disaggregated architecture allows storage capacity to be dynamically allocated, augmented or replaced, without impacting the rack’s performance or requiring maintenance downtime.

E8 Storage integrates its rack-scale flash architecture with the Mellanox ConnectX-4 NICs (Network Interface Cards), thus enabling converged networking with very low latency and very high throughput and bandwidth. Since it combines the benefits of local flash and NVMe with the benefits of centralized storage and high availability, this is especially suitable for hyper-scale data centers and large data centers that are deploying NVMe devices today, as well as enterprise and private cloud efforts seeking next-generation All-Flash-Arrays.

“As the industry’s leading provider of high-performance networking technology, Mellanox offers the most efficient end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet smart interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage,” said Kevin Deierling, Vice President of Marketing, Mellanox Technologies. “Our solutions deliver unmatched throughput and latency and thus improve the overall data center computing efficiency, by delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance. We are pleased to partner with AIC at Computex 2017, and look forward to further collaboration between Mellanox and AIC.”

“AIC is always in the forefront and working towards to new generations of technology. We started to work with Intel as a close partner for years; furthermore, AIC is ready to integrate Intel’s next generation solution for 3D NAND Flash SSDs and Intel Optane Memory Technology into our products, and so on Intel ready to launch,” said Michael Liang, CEO of AIC.

“AIC committed to the development of the highest quality products as the goal, strategic alliance for all partners, to provide customers Turnkey Solutions. We offer our products and services as “Hardware Plus Software,” and provide customers the one take solution. Designing the best quality solutions for our customer is always the ultimate goal for AIC’s ongoing effort.”