A good friend of mine is a venture capitalist. He likes to jump into emerging market segments when the “water gets frothy.” A quick Google search of “NVMe-oF” yields 26 million results in just under .7 seconds. 5 years ago, the same search would turn up, at best 2,600. The NVMe-oF water is indeed getting frothy. Big Storage has taken notice. Yesterday brought another announcement. This one comes from the expert marketeers at Pure Storage who offer a dramatically cooler name for our nerdy RDMA-over-Converged Ethernet (RoCE™). The newly christened DirectFlash Fabric™ is a fabulous story of disaggregation, hyper-scalability, superior
I’m constantly amazed by the specsmanship of the data storage industry. Every month we hear about some new system that can achieve a gazillion IOPS or store 100’s of petabytes. We revel in our own glory, often without consideration of the consequences. Current examples are NVMe All-Flash Array and Software-Defined Storage (SDS) marketeers running amok. Our industry is consistently rewarded for storage capacity density. This is the number of TBs that can be crammed into a shelf or rack unit (RU). It is why drive makers constantly increase capacities for every form factor and Big Storage is cleverly stuffing as many drives as possible into
In June of 1963, John F. Kennedy sounded the optimistic note that good times would benefit all with the phrase, “a rising tide lifts all ships.” It was as true in ’63 as it is today. As new technologies are introduced, the benefits of communities working together creates a sum that is much greater than its individual parts. I’m excited today that Pavilion Data Systems has joined the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) with a strong commitment to the standardization of composable/disaggregated infrastructures, management frameworks and data security. Over the coming months our representatives will become integrated into these technical
2019 is the year of NVMe and Composable/Disaggregated Infrastructure (CDI) is ushering in the 2nd wave of NVMe adoption, offering disruptive performance, scale, and now, radical new business models. As the price per gigabyte continues to decline, drive manufacturers are increasing IOPs, throughput and capacity in a fashion that resembles Moore’s Law. As this continues, you would expect enterprise storage systems providers (aka Big Storage) to keep up. Yet the snazzy new All-Flash Array (AFA) you are planning to purchase is not upgradable, and as you purchase more capacity, you get to pay per GB for capacity expansion and support.