A disturbing trend is occurring with cloud-scale and enterprise accounts where the deployment of NVMe SSDs is capped at less than 3TB. The reason? Node recovery. With DAS deployments, the average recovery time for 1TB of NVMe can take hours and negatively impact application performance! The result? We are deploying complete nodes (servers, storage, network, memory) to accommodate capacity growth when all we really need are fatter SSDs. Modern applications were designed to scale out using Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) with many servers working together processing sharded data in a parallel fashion. In most cases, customers have enjoyed the
I’m proud to work for a company that values intellectual property. Writing patent claims is no easy task. It takes creativity and technical diligence to define the future, cite prior art, and put up with the legal eagles. In some environments where I have worked, creating patents was frowned upon as it takes time away from getting to market faster. My belief is that patents are a mark of great engineers working together and doing the really hard work to prove their invention is worthy of merit in the context of history and in the definition of the
We are witnessing the 2nd wave of NVMe adoption where SSDs move from a captive resource inside a server to a pool of shared media delivered across a network. Sound familiar? I watched this story play out in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the advent of Storage Area Networks (SANs). This shift in storage architecture came about because HDDs were stranded inside servers, creating islands of storage that had poor utilization, limited scalability, and painful management challenges. The SAN changed everything. New billion-dollar companies emerged, and petabytes replaced terabytes as the lexicon of choice. Even new
I was President of a Little League Baseball organization for several years. Every player under the age of 9 would get a “participation trophy” for showing up and trying. You see the same practice in most youth sports programs these days. I thought of this when Pure Storage announced their support for DirectFlash™ Fabric this week. The new feature allows them to connect their FlashArray//X to RDMA-capable Ethernet hosts using NVMe-oF. Just like Pavilion, they are targeting ‘modern stack’ applications that require massive parallelism, low latency, and high bandwidth. These applications rarely use shared storage since traditional SANs add