Faster storage now needs a faster network. And there is no arguing that the next major shot in the arm for performance is NVMe-oF, an extension of the NVMe protocol through the network to applications. It’s designed to deliver faster and more efficient connectivity between storage and servers, as well as a reduction in CPU utilization of application host servers.
To continue to shift the bottleneck, faster storage now needs a faster network. And there is no arguing the next major shot in the arm for performance is NVMe-oF, an extension of the NVMe protocol through the network to applications. It’s designed to deliver faster and more efficient connectivity between storage and servers, as well as a reduction in CPU utilization of application host servers.
Today, few organizations have implemented NVMe-oF in production environments with moderate overall enterprise adoption. As with all fabric changes, the transition happens very slowly. The reason? It always takes time for the broader ecosystem to get ready and support an end to end solution. Plus, you never want to disrupt your current operations by having to make substantial changes to your fabric infrastructure.
Make no mistake.This change is coming, but there’s no need to worry. We’ve architected for the future and have been working hard with our partners to develop an end-to-end NVMe-oF solution. And as the ecosystem around NVMe-oF continues to mature, I’m excited to announce HPE Alletra 9000 now supports NVMe-oF. With this announcement, HPE is primed and ready to take NVMe-oF to the Enterprises. How is that the case?
There are three key considerations for data storage when it comes to NVMe-oF and we’ve got all the bases covered:
- The right underlying storage architecture. HPE Alletra 9000’s all-active architecture exploits the full benefits of NVMe’s massive parallelization.
- Investment protection with seamless deployment. HPE Alletra 9000 enables you to leverage your existing fibre channel SAN infrastructure with no disruption.
- Ecosystem maturity with broad application support. HPE Alletra 9000 enables you to run both traditional and modern mission-critical workloads with predictable performance.
For almost a decade, the name of the game has been focused on shifting the bottleneck to drive better performance. You’re never going to eliminate bottlenecks altogether, but you can move them elsewhere and hopefully make them less impactful.
For example, what good is a new highway, if you can’t even get out of your own driveway? This is why the underlying storage architecture is absolutely critical. With HPE Alletra 9000, we designed it for massive parallelization so you’re always cruising on a highway and never stuck in gridlock. A multi-node, all-active architecture taps into more horsepower to reap the full benefits of NVMe. Not only do you get mission critical resiliency, but you’re also freed from constant tuning because HPE Alletra 9000 delivers balanced I/O across every physical component.
To extend the benefits of this massive parallelization, HPE Alletra 9000 supports NVMe-oF across the entire system’s front end (i.e. host connectivity) and back-end (i.e. all-flash media). This means HPE Alletra delivers highway like connectivity from the host, to the storage nodes, and ultimately to every single SSD deployed within the system.
The net result is industry leading performance density in a teeny, tiny, footprint. As an example, an all-NVMe HPE Alletra 9000 already pumps out over 2M IOPs and minimum average latencies below 250usec in just 4U. That’s 3x more performance density than a Dell PowerMax.
The bottom line is with an-active architecture, HPE Alletra 9000 is best equipped to bring NVMe-oF technology to enterprises everywhere. Higher performance is an obvious outcome, but in addition you can take advantage of workload consolidation, which leads to lower costs. And, by lowering the CPU utilization on the host, you can significantly reduce the processing and memory needs of servers, freeing up resources to run applications, and saving on power, cooling, and licensing costs for applications.
Investment protection with seamless network integration
The NVMe-oF standard was created to extend the benefits of NVMe to shared storage. It was designed to support many transport protocols, including Fibre Channel (FC), RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), InfiniBand, and TCP.
Fibre Channel is the dominant protocol for transferring data between storage devices and servers for mission-critical applications. Most enterprises already entrust their mission-critical applications to FC SANs because of their consistent performance, reliability, and resilience.
We chose to deploy the NVMe command set encapsulated inside FC frames because we knew it enables a seamless path to NVMe-oF while protecting our customer’s current investments. It relies on common FC processes like zoning, and it coexists effortlessly with today’s standard FC Protocol, in which SCSI command sets are encapsulated in FC frames.
This means HPE Alletra 9000 customers with 16Gb or higher (Gen5 or later) fibre channel SANs already have the network infrastructure in place for NVMe-oF. Nothing needs to be replaced or swapped out. It’s super simple, seamless, and cost-effective to add NVMe-oF into a current FC environment.
And the good news is if the market develops for NVMe-oF via other protocols, then we will be ready. We already have extensive experience with RoCEv2 across the HPE Alletra backend.
Ecosystem maturity with broad application support
NVME-oF has broad application support and holds the potential to accelerate both traditional and modern mission critical workloads. These are latency sensitive applications that require massive parallelization which HPE Alletra 9000 uniquely delivers.
The vast majority of today’s applications are run on virtualized machines. We’ve been working hard with VMware to develop an end to end NVMe-oF solution so the bulk of enterprise applications can benefit from NVMe's reduced latency. VMware vSphere version 7 delivered the first iteration of support for NVMe-oF. This significantly increased the number of app environments that can leverage the performance advantages of NVMe technology.
Summary
The move from spinning disk to flash provided roughly a 10X performance improvement. The advent of NVMe drives increased performance again—but then the bottleneck shifted to host connectivity. The data path prevented applications from unlocking the full performance potential of NVMe drives.
We’re now at the precipice of the next major milestone. NVMe-oF holds the potential to drive the next performance boost by extending parallelization from all-flash through the switch and on to the host. But remember, the three key considerations for NVMe-oF done right are the following:
- It starts with the right underlying storage architecture! Without the horsepower of an all-active storage system, you’ll just be stuck in the onramp watching other cars cruise by on the highway.
- Next is investment protection. Why replace what you got when it’s super simple, seamless, and cost-effective to add NVMe-oF into a current FC environment?
- And finally broad application support so you can run both modern and traditional mission-critical apps.
This is why I’m so excited HPE Alletra 9000 is making the promise of NVMe-oF a reality and bringing this technology to enterprises everywhere. We’re working with customers right now, making NVMe-oF generally available later this year.
Be sure to visit HPE Discover - and read the new Storage overview blog from Sandeep Singh, Reimagining storage and data management to unleash the power of your data .
Matt Morrissey has been in the storage industry for over 20 years and has worked for HPE for the last 10. As a Senior Product Marketing Manager, he is passionate about showing the world how HPE Primera is redefining mission critical storage. Connect with Matt on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Storage Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
twitter.com/HPE_Storage
linkedin.com/showcase/hpestorage/
hpe.com/storage
StorageExperts
Our team of Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage experts helps you dive deep into relevant data storage and data protection topics.
