Moving data is no fun. Data has a weight, and that weight can fall heavily on budgets and schedules. Worse, moving data eats up a considerable amount of computing resources that could be running those money-making applications. A company called Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. has a solution in the form of a system known as RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE).

To learn more about RoCE, Stu Miniman (@stu) and Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), cohost and guest host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke with Kevin Deierling, VP of Marketing at Mellanox Technologies, during  VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas.

A new generation of support

The conversation began with Deierling describing some recent announcements. He mentioned RoCE would have complete in-box support for the next generation of adaptors. Also, he included that RoCE would have in-box compatibility with vSphere (the name for VMware’s suite of virtualization products), enabling the VMware crowd to step up to hyper-converged and software-defined storage running on the technology.

“RoCE is the way we’ve brought our heritage to the ethernet world,” Deierling said. “When RoCE is in-boxed, it’s easy to install, a company can just use it, and it’s supported by VMware. When you plug it in, it’s going to work.”

Virtualized efficiencies

The talk moved toward the benefits of RoCE. Deierling explained that the technology allows companies to bypass the kernel for really low latency between virtual machines. As a result, moving data doesn’t eat CPU time, allowing the system to run more applications.

The CPU and memory systems are the most expensive part of the server, Deierling said. When a company moves data, they’re using that expensive hardware just to move data. RoCE gives all the data movement, but frees up those cores for more applications.

“The workloads span across all industries,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE