SAN JOSE, Calif., March 27, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise and cloud data centers, announced that its FastLinQ QL45000 Series of 10/25GbE Ethernet NICs are now certified for Microsoft Windows Server Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) Premium, the highest category of SDDC certification from Microsoft. Customers can now leverage the full potential of Windows Server 2016 cloud-ready technologies like Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Storage Spaces Direct, as well as Microsoft Azure Stack with Cavium FastLinQ NICs.

"Traditional network infrastructures are rigid and complex, making it time-consuming to deploy workloads that require network changes and increasing the chance for error," said Frank Berry, founder and senior analyst, IT Brand Pulse. "Organizations can achieve rapid scale and agility when they adopt a software-defined network (SDN) and software-defined storage (SDS) model for deployment and management. Windows Server software-defined datacenter technologies like Storage Spaces Direct backed with certified products enable organizations to look beyond server virtualization to achieve higher efficiency and meet operational and security challenges."

"Software Defined Networking, Storage Spaces Direct and Microsoft Azure Stack are core to Microsoft's strategy to deliver a software-defined hybrid cloud infrastructure," said Ravi Rao, Group Manager, Datacenter and Cloud Networking, Windows Server, Microsoft Corp. "The SDDC Premium certification enables datacenter managers and system integrators deploying Microsoft SDDC technologies to leverage the proven feature set and high-performance capabilities of Cavium Ethernet NICs to build an efficient and reliable hyper-converged datacenter."

Arun Mittal, Vice President of Engineering, Cavium, said, "Cavium FastLinQ NIC delivers hardware offloads for VxLAN overlays, Virtual Machine Multi-Queue (VMMQ) for Hyper-V Virtual Machines, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and Data Center Bridging (DCB) for RDMA, key requirements for SDDC Premium certifications. This achievement further solidifies the key role Cavium FastLinQ NICs play in delivering full software defined capabilities for storage and networking for Windows Server 2016." 

Craig Parker, Head of Integrated Systems Business, EMEAI, Fujitsu, said, "We are fast-tracking the creation of enterprise software-defined datacenters (SDDC) and our PRIMERGY servers form the system bedrock for Microsoft's cloud-ready Windows Server 2016 solutions. We are working closely with Cavium and Microsoft to bring to customers a scalable and agile platform that guarantees a tested and perfectly synchronized combination of software defined technologies. The Cavium FastLinQ SDDC Premium certification is a significant step in the right direction."

Customers deploying Microsoft SDDC Premium certified Cavium FastLinQ 10/25GbE NICs with Windows Server 2016 will have the ability to leverage the following technologies to their maximum potential:

• Software Defined Networking: Delivering the ability to offload packet processing for VxLAN and NVGRE overlays for network virtualized environments, Cavium FastLinQ NICs and Windows Server 2016 enable an agile and high performance software-defined network for cloud-ready datacenters, with support for VMMQ, RDMA, DCB, and many other offloads. SDDC Premium certified products are pre-configured and recommended for SDN on Windows Server 2016.
• Storage Spaces Direct: With support and acceleration for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, FastLinQ 45000 Series of Ethernet adapters with Universal RDMA enable customers to build highly available and scalable software-defined storage and hyper-converged solutions with Ethernet RDMA as the storage fabric. Leveraging standard servers with local storage brings the affordability and scalability of the cloud to private and hybrid cloud deployments. SDDC Premium certified NICs are recommended for maximum scalability of a Storage Spaces Direct hyper-converged deployment.
• Microsoft Azure Stack: Delivering a new hybrid cloud platform product with Azure Stack, Microsoft in conjunction with OEMs and ODMs is bringing the power and simplicity of the Azure cloud platform to on-premises environments. SDDC Premium certified Ethernet NICs are required for Azure Stack solutions, making the FastLinQ QL45000 Series an ideal choice for OEMs and ODMs building turnkey solutions for Azure Stack.

For more information, visit www.qlogic.com and www.cavium.com

About Cavium

Cavium, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAVM), offers a broad portfolio of infrastructure solutions for compute, security, storage, switching, connectivity and baseband processing. Cavium's highly integrated multi-core SoC products deliver software compatible solutions across low to high performance points enabling secure and intelligent functionality in Enterprise, Data Center and Service Provider Equipment. Cavium processors and solutions are supported by an extensive ecosystem of operating systems, tools, application stacks, hardware reference designs and other products. Cavium is headquartered in San Jose, CA with design centers in California, Massachusetts, India, Israel, China and Taiwan.

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SOURCE Cavium, Inc.