Breaking Digital Logjams with NVMe
By
Ian Sagan, Marvell Field Applications Engineer and Jacqueline Nguyen, Marvell Field Marketing Manager and Nick De Maria, Marvell Field Applications Engineer
What is NVMe®?
NVMe is a purpose-built protocol for NVMe SSDs (solid state drives based on NAND Flash storage media). This set of industry-standard technical specifications, developed by a non-profit consortium called NVM Express, defines how host software communicates with flash storage across a PCI Express® bus. As noted in the recent Marvell Whitepaper on NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF), these specs comprise:
- NVMe, which is a command set that is efficient and manageable, with a faster queuing mechanism and scalable for multi-core CPUs.
- NVMe Management Interface (NVMe-MI), which is a command set and architecture that can use a Baseboard Management Controller to discover, monitor, and update NVMe devices.
-
Why use NVMe?
- Is more streamlined, with fewer command sets and fewer clock cycles per IO, making it faster and more efficient than legacy storage protocols such as SCSI, SAS and SATA
- Is designed to deliver higher bandwidth and lower latency storage access
- Offers more command queues and deeper command queues than the legacy protocols
Can I afford NVMe?
No.
- When is it better to patch a datacenter than undertake a full refresh?
- What are the tradeoffs between familiarity, accessibility, and breakthrough performance?
- What is the transaction cost of changing to new protocols?
What components do I need to implement NVMe?
For administrators considering a shift to NVMe, two major categories of solutions exist:
-
- A modern server with enough PCIe interfaces to host local NVMe drives for caching and/or capacity
- Marvell® FastLinQ® 10/25GbE NICs with Universal RDMA (RoCEv2 and iWARP) for high speed, high intercluster network connectivity
- External Block Based Storage (All Flash Array) – This solution delivers disaggregated storage where multiple applications access pools of NVMe for application acceleration
- A modern server, typically virtualized and hosting multiple applications that need access to high speed storage
- Marvell QLogic® FC HBAs with concurrent FC-SCSI and FC-NVMe capabilities – all Enhanced 16GFC and 32GFC HBAs (or)
- Marvell FastLinQ 10/25GbE NICs with NVMe/RDMA or NVMe/TCP capabilities
- Supported Storage Array with All-Flash NVMe, several available in the market
- Latest operating systems with support for NVMe over Fabrics like Linux and VMware ESXi 7.0 onwards.
Why administrators should embrace NVMe today
For early adopters, NVMe and NVMe-oF delivers immediate benefits – dramatic savings in time, energy and total cost of ownership – paying dividends for years to come.
Additional NVMe information:
标签: FastLinQ,
FC-NVMe,
NVMe,
NVMe-oF,
NVMe RoCE,
NVMe TCP,
QLogic