Introducing ATTO Technology Ethernet Suite

ATTO FastFrame™ SmartNIC users may have already noticed a brand-new addition to the ATTO software family, but in case you haven’t we’d like to introduce you to ATTO Ethernet Suite.

ATTO Ethernet Suite is a custom installer for Windows® and Linux® that allows you to easily select and install the FastFrame 3 (10/25/40/50/100GbE) drivers and utilities you need.

Ethernet Suite solves perhaps one of the primary challenges Ethernet data center managers face today which is being overwhelmed by all of the utilities and dependencies needed to reduce overhead and implement new technologies like RDMA. With the press of a button, ATTO Ethernet Suite loads the appropriate driver, our ATTO 360 Tuning, Monitoring, and Analytics Software utility, and dependencies needed for RDMA transfers.

When we started testing and integrating RDMA protocols with our SmartNICs, we realized the information needed to establish data transfers via these new protocols like NFS over RDMA, NVMe over Fabrics, and SMB direct can be staggering. We’ve seen detailed guides on how to connect NFS over RDMA that include dozens of detailed steps.

Our senior engineers were steeped in the process and needed an extra day to start passing I/O which they felt was too long. RDMA transfers are far more complicated than the old reliable (but very slow) TCP transfers. We saw a way to uncomplicate the process for our users.

The solution we came up with was to automate those detailed steps into a single option while installing the ATTO driver. Now, with ATTO Ethernet Suite, you can select the FastFrame driver, ATTO 360 Software, and the type of RDMA protocol needed for setup and Ethernet Suite does all of the extra work for you.

Currently, ATTO users can set up NFSoRDMA, NVMe-oF, and SMB-direct. We plan on adding more protocols over time and are constantly on the lookout for problems we can solve to make life easier for our customers. It’s the same ease-of-use philosophy behind our popular ATTO 360 Software utility which offers one-click tuning profiles for specific workflows, monitoring both real-time and point-in-time analytics, and a diagnostic engine with alerts to inform users of bottlenecks and how to remove them and improve throughput and efficiency.

Updates for both ATTO Ethernet Suite (Windows and Linux only) and ATTO 360 (macOS®, Windows, and Linux) are available on our website. We encourage all FastFrame and ATTO ThunderLink® Thunderbolt™ Ethernet adapter users to download and take advantage of these tools intended to make your job easier.