GigaIO Honored with Best of Show Award for the Most Innovative Flash Memory Customer Implementation at Flash Memory Summit 2019
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GigaIO, the creators of next-generation data center network architecture and connectivity solutions, was honored with a Flash Memory Summit 2019 Best of Show Award for the Most Innovative Flash Memory Customer Implementation at last night’s awards ceremony.
Flash Memory Summit, the world’s largest and most prestigious storage industry conference and exposition, recognizes GigaIO for their impressive leadership and innovation with technology and solutions in the Flash Memory and Solid-State Storage industries.
According to show organizers, a record number of award submissions were received this year, making the judging challenging and each of the categories extremely competitive.
“The next generation of deep learning applications demands a new level of performance, and the storage network plays a vital role in meeting service level objectives for the data center,” says Jay Kramer, chairman of the Awards Program and president of Network Storage Advisors Inc. “We are proud to recognize GigaIO and their FabreX technology for delivering record breaking performance at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) with the innovation of an NVMe-oF native PCIe fabric solution.”
“It is an incredible honor to win this year’s award for Most Innovative Flash Memory Customer Implementation,” says Alan Benjamin, CEO of GigaIO. “SDSC is a leading facility for data-intensive computing research, which made it an excellent environment to study the effectiveness of GigaIO’s FabreX on a live application. When compared to SDSC’s existing system, FabreX delivered higher system performance at a dramatically reduced cost, establishing itself as the next generation network architecture for heterogeneous compute and fast storage applications. Our collaboration with SDSC is hugely rewarding, and I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to everyone involved for their invaluable support. We look forward to our continued work together.”
The Flash Memory Customer Implementation category recognizes innovation in the implementation of flash memory in a real customer application, represented by a case study that highlights how a customer has solved an important problem by use of a specific product or service. Implementations include return on investment, data protection, software defined storage, simplicity of operations and other advantages that benefit the customer.
Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) runs natively over peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) inside a server, while NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) allows for using NVMe drives across legacy networks, including Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand. These networks enable easy sharing of the NVMe drives but at the cost of reduced performance levels. In contrast, GigaIO’s next generation network, FabreX, brings an NVMe PCIe native network option to NVMe-oF, while eliminating any reduction in performance for networked
storage. For the first time, network attached storage runs at the same performance level as direct attached storage. Every FabreX network runs native PCIe end-to-end and is 100 percent compliant with Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) and NVMe standards.
GigaIO partnered with SDSC to explore how FabreX could benefit deep learning applications by matching a demonstration system named Rincon against an SDSC supercomputer named Comet. When compared to Comet, Rincon consistently achieved greater graphics processing unit (GPU) utilization, delivering 25 percent higher system performance at less than half the price.