DENVER — In collaboration with Western Digital, composable infrastructure vendor Liqid this week demonstrated the ability to orchestrate NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) across low-latency Ethernet fabrics.

Liqid’s composable infrastructure disaggregates resources like storage or GPUs from the CPU and memory, and it allows them to be dynamically allocated using Liqid Command Center software. By disaggregating these resources, enterprises can build server configurations that would otherwise be impossible — effectively allowing them to build the “impossible” server, said Bryant Schramm, COO at Liqid.

Liqid’s collaboration with Western Digital demonstrates the ability to achieve this over Ethernet fabrics, thus allowing customers to aggregate and share large pools of resources including high-speed, low-latency NVMe storage regardless of where the physical hardware is located.

The demonstration used Western Digital’s Open Composable API and Liqid’s Command Center software suite. This orchestrated OpenFlex platform resources and enabled faster NVMe-oF deployments while expanding the scope of composable resources.

Western Digital’s OpenFlex F3100 offers 61.4 terabytes of capacity per device, each of which features a dual-port 50 Gb/s Ethernet fabric connection. Up to 10 of these devices can be installed in the company’s E3000 enclosure, which can offer performance in excess of 110 Gb/s and 22 million input/output operations per second.

Once connected to Liqid's Command Center software suite, those resources can be allocated wherever they are needed for as long as they are needed. According to Liqid, this application is well suited to data-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence (AI).

“With OpenFlex and Liqid, IT users can create more precisely balanced, disaggregated systems that can scale to meet evolving business requirements,” said Scott Hamilton, senior director of product management for Western Digital’s data center business unit, in a statement.

Liqid’s Command Center currently supports PCIe 3.0, PCIe 4.0, Mellanox Infiniband, and Ethernet, with plans to add support for the upcoming Gen-Z and CXL specifications. The release of version 2.2 will expand support across all fabrics to dynamically compose server from pools of CPU, GPU, FPGA, NVMe, Intel Optane memory, and networking.