By: Patty Brogdon | March 26, 2019 | SANBlaze Non-volatile memory express (NVMe™) storage media and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) storage network protocols are taking the storage industry by storm, providing the much sought-after higher levels of performance and latency than found in legacy interfaces (SAS and SATA) and storage protocols (such as iSCSI.) This is good news for enterprise data centers that are struggling to keep up with emerging technologies like Big Data (and the analytics that go with it), and artificial intelligence.
A recent article on the nvmexpress.org website written by Janene Ellefson, NVM Express Marketing Workgroup Co-Chair, promises great things for NVMe:
Deemed “the new language of storage,” NVM Express® saw a year of recognition and implementation in 2018, with more than 100 companies offering NVMe™ or enabled products. Looking forward to 2019, NVMe is not expected to plateau; in fact, most analysts and industry experts anticipate this will be the year of NVMe™ over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™). With NVMe-oF increasing in popularity, G2M Research predicts that NVMe market will consistently grow and reach a revenue level of over $80B by 2022.
With such high expectations for NVMe, it is no wonder that storage professionals are being tasked with making recommendations to higher ups in their organizations to determine if NVMe is right for their own data center.
Of course, whenever a new technology emerges, there is always the inevitable hype that goes along with it. Deciphering that hype and determining how NVMe could potentially benefit the needs of your organization can be a daunting task. While we may all agree that NVMe is crazy fast and superior to long standing protocols such as iSCSI, the only real question is: Will my organization benefit from NVMe? This is an important question because it’s not just the protocols under the hood that justify the cost of replacing legacy systems with NVMe, it’s about collecting real data on your organization’s workloads that sit upon and interact with the protocols underneath them.
SANBlaze teamed up with Storage Switzerland and Virtual Instruments to answer this question. On February 27th we participated in a live webinar that went through the ins and outs of determining if your own data center could benefit from NVMe. George Crump, Founder and Lead Analyst of the storage analyst firm Storage Switzerland (the company name indicating a pledge to provide neutral analysis of the storage marketplace, rather than focusing on a single vendor approach), led the discussion along with Henry He, Director of Product Management for Virtual Instruments, and Mitul Patel, Sr. Systems / Software Engineer for SANBlaze. You can watch a recording of the live webinar here.
The speakers went through the various “gotchas” of implementing NVMe over Fabrics, stressing that the only way to test NVMe in your own environment is to use Production Workload Modeling. Any lab set up to test NVMe in a production environment would cost more than implementing NVMe itself! By using Production Workload Modeling, enterprises can get hard and fast data on how NVMe would affect their own workloads, providing a true data-driven answer to the question. Virtual Instruments and SANBlaze have teamed up to provide the latest state-of-the-art technology for enterprises to determine how to cut CapEx and OpEx costs in any migration-to-NVMe endeavor.
For more information on how this technology helps enterprises, download Storage Switzerland’s Analyst Briefing Note Making NVMe™and NVMe-oF™ Testing Accessible for the Enterprise.