New-Tech Europe Magazine | Sep 2019 | Digital Edition

Determining the Best Option for NVMe-over-Fabrics

By Ian Sagan, Field Application Engineer, Marvell

Why do you need to consider NVMe-over- Fabrics? When conceived, NVMe’s primary objective was to allow central processing units (CPUs) to access NVMe-based SSDs within the server using the PCIe bus. However, as storage administrators are aware local server storage provides major administration headaches – particularly in terms of having to over-provision expensive SSD storage resources (so there is adequate headroom factored in to cope with any excess demand). Different servers require different amounts of high performance NVMe SSD storage depending on their application workloads. These applications can migrate to different physical servers but still require the same amount of SSD storage. To stop every server having to be overpopulated with expensive SSD storage, it’s more

Non-volatile memory express (NVMe™) presents a streamlined protocol to deliver low latency operation and is being adopted by all the major server and storage vendors. It is replacing small computer system interface (SCSI) in modern solid state disk (SSD) resources. As a result of its adoption, NVMe-enabled SSDs are now eliminating the bottlenecks that were inherent in traditional storage implementations– leading to substantial improvements in the access speeds for a variety of applications spanning mobile platforms to enterprise data centers. In the following article, critical questions concerning NVMe-enabled SSDs deployment and use at scale will be answered. Why is NVMe becoming so widely adopted and proliferating? NVMe is designed from the ground up to communicate at high speed with

flash storage, and only requires 30 commands that are specific to dealing with SSDs. In addition, this protocol supports multiple deep command queues in order to take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of the latest multi-core processors. With up to 64K commands per queue and support of up to 64K queues, NVMe signifies a huge advancement over traditional SCSI, SAS and SATA protocols – which were originally developed for spinning hard disk drives (HDDs). Global sales in NVMe-based SSD drives are now overtaking those relating to SAS and SATA SSD storage*. This is due to the dramatically improved performance that the NVMe protocol provides, for both current and next generation SSD technologies (such as 3D XPoint and NVDIMM Non-Volatile DIMMs).

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