All Flash NVMe Storage

All Flash NVMe Storage delivers currently the fastest performance available. Nonetheless, deploying the best of the best in terms of I.T. equipment is essential for businesses to remain competitive. The compounded affects of improper, inadequate infrastructures really has measurable negative consequences.

Any business or organization today considering a data centre upgrade should seriously be looking at the potential that all flash NVMe storage arrays provide over all other types of storage. Traditional SAS, SATA and Fibre Channel connected storage all require an HBA card or controller that sits between the storage and CPU, this is where NVMe storage differs. NVMe flash directly addresses the CPU negating the need of an HBA card.

1. Performance – Using NVMe is up to 53x faster than hard disks and at least 5x faster than SSD.

2. How does it work? NVMe flash storage uses PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 to directly connect the CPU, unlike SAS/SATA/Fibre Channel that require an HBA (Host Bus Adapter)

What does NVMe stand for? Non-Volatile Memory Express

How can NVMe flash connect to our infrastructure? NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabric using fibre channel), NVMe over Infiniband, Ethernet (RoCE and iWARP).

All flash NVMe storage performance

NVMe uses multiple PCIe bus lanes. Each lane has 2 pairs of wires to send and receive data.

PCIe 3.0 – Supports one, four, eight or sixteen lanes in a single PCIe slot, denoted as X1, X4, X8 or X16. Therefor the maximum performance for PCIe 3.0 is approximately 1GB/s per lane x 16 x 2 = 32GB/s in a single PCIe slot.

PCIe 4.0 – Supports one, four, eight, sixteen or 32 lanes lanes in a single PCIe slot, denoted as X1, X4, X8, X16 or 32X. Therefor the maximum performance for PCIe 4.0 is approximately 2GB/s per lane x 32 x 2 = 64GB/s in a single PCIe slot. These cards will work in a PCIe slot but will operate at PCIe 3 speeds.

NVMe can handle 64,000 command queues and send 64,000 commands per queue at the same time, whereas an SSD or hard disk only has 1 command queue and can send a maximum of 32 commands per queue. The NVMe to PCIe commands also require relatively low CPU cycles compared to SAS/SATA/SSD drives. Ideally the CPU should have as many multiple cores as possible in order to sustain the transfer rates that all flash NVMe storage provides.

Over the next 5 years, all data storage systems will be using NVMe & PCIe 4.0. With newer flash memory technologies emerging such as 3D XPoint and Optane, the future roadmap for NVMe based flash arrays is very bright.

Get yourself a data storage Apache, get yourself all flash NVMe storage for your business infrastructure.

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