White Papers

Executive summary
4 PVRDMA Deployment and Configuration of QLogic CNA devices in VMware ESXi | Technical White
Paper | 401
Executive summary
The speed at which data can be transferred is critical for efficiently using information. RDMA offers an ideal
option for helping with better data center efficiency by reducing overall complexity and increasing the
performance of data delivery.
RDMA is designed to transfer data from storage device to server without passing the data through the CPU
and main memory path of TCP/IP Ethernet. Better processor and overall system efficiencies are achieved as
the computation power is harnessed and not used in processing network traffic.
RDMA enables sub-microsecond latencies and up to 56 Gb/s bandwidth, translating into swift application
performance, better storage and data center utilization, and simplified network management.
Until recently, RDMA was only available in InfiniBand fabrics. With the advent of RDMA over Converged
Ethernet (RoCE), the benefits of RDMA are now available for data centers that are based on an Ethernet or
mixed-protocol fabric as well.
For more information about RDMA and the protocols that are used, see Dell Networking – RDMA over
Converged.