NVMe alone is not enough, it’s time for Storage Class Memory

[Graham-M]

We all know that businesses always need to do things faster, especially with newer applications derived from Machine Learning, AI and from In Memory Databases, but the one thing that has been lacking has been predictability with performance.  As workloads are added to, and proliferate across, storage arrays they battle each other for resources.  Some become “bullies” and start hogging all of the bandwidth and performance while others are pushed into the background.  This is not an outcome customers want, and some of the applications that are losing out could be the ones that are critical to the business and that can only be a bad thing!

Business today want high performance with the lowest possibly latency, all of the time, across all of their applications using their expensive storage arrays

So, how can HPE help address this?

First and foremost, we need to remember that NVMe is actually a protocol, and as such NVMe does go a long way towards helping as it enables Flash drives to open up and allow processor cores to access storage directly.  This really does start speeding things up quite nicely, but the limitation suddenly becomes your media.  SSD NAND drives today, which is what we all use in some way, shape or form in our arrays are still storage devices and have the same limitations when it comes to accessing, storing and retrieving data.  Installing an NVMe NAND drive means you can realize some increase in performance, as it’s optimized to work with the NVMe protocol, but it still is limited and we see typically no more than a 5% increase in performance for most workloads.

HPE understands that just moving customers to NVMe based systems, with NVMe NAND drives, is not enough.  You have to apply NVMe with a new storage technology to get the results you truly want.  To achieve this, we have introduced Storage Class Memory onto our All Flash 3PAR 9000 and 20000 R2 Storage systems.

Helping customers realize their performance expectations

With Storage Class Memory, customers can easily realize their performance expectations, react faster and improve their business outcomes.  At a device level there are significant performance improvements when comparing NVMe NAND drives to NVMe SCM drives and we’ve seen up to 2X improved latency, so workloads become faster and more predictable.

HPE’s 3PAR architecture easily adapts to this role with minimal fuss, proving that you don’t need an entirely new array type to start moving to NVMe now.  We can even use SSDs as a Capacity Tier to remove the need for spinning media all together and move to a hybrid storage array with all flash technology.

Oh, and did we mention that while SCM is available on 3PAR now, it’s coming to Nimble Storage a little later in 2019?

Speak to your HPE sales representative today to see how HPE 3PAR and Storage Class Memory can help your business realize its full potential.

[BrianJenkinson]

Nice article Graham, HPE always looking to overcome the next bottleneck.