Flash Memory Summit: Toshiba Unveils NVMe Over Fabrics Software Technology for Cloud Data Centers

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) unveiled software technology essential to enabling deployment of NVMe-oF (NVM Express over Fabrics).

This software stack deploys on storage servers, and provides critical SSD abstraction, security and manageability currently lacking from existing open source implementations. Addressing cloud data centers with diverse and demanding storage requirements, this software is key to leveraging the capacity and performance of NVMe SSDs and creating more dynamic and scalable infrastructures.

NVMe-oF is a storage architecture that runs NVMe commands over a fabric transport to enable NVMe based storage to be shared across network and scaled to thousands of devices with near DAS-like performance. Seamlessly integrating with popular orchestration and provisioning frameworks, Toshiba’s software abstracts the details of physical SSDs to enable them to rapidly assign virtual namespaces of any size and performance to any compute node making NVMe-oF truly deployable in cloud data centers.

Future innovations will focus on additional enhancements to scalability, reliability, and HA through flexible flash management and integrated security.

“Toshiba sees NVMe-oF as an important near-term storage technology that very effectively utilizes flash across the data center by disaggregating storage and enabling dynamic, diverse applications to share high performance, high capacity NVMe SSDs,” said Steve Fingerhut, SVP and GM, SSD business unit, Toshiba America Electronic Components. “Our software technology makes NVMe-oF attached flash easily deployable in the cloud data center. We’re proud to collaborate with Mellanox and Lenovo to demonstrate this groundbreaking technology at Flash Memory Summit.“

“As the performance of both networks and SSDs grows faster, new opportunities to utilize networked storage like NVMe-oF are emerging,” said Rob Davis, VP, storage technology, Mellanox Technologies Ltd. “Toshiba’s NVMe-oF software technology enables cloud data centers to easily deploy Toshiba’s NVMe SSDs with Mellanox ConnectX Network Adapters, including ConnectX-5 and our new BlueField ⁽³⁾ SOC.“

Toshiba, Mellanox and Lenovo Enterprise Solutions, Pte Ltd demonstrated NVMe-oF software at Flash Memory Summit.