FMS: DataCore Showcased Software-Defined Storage and Customer Path to NVMe over Fabric

At Flash Memory Summit 2018, DataCore Software Corporation showcased how its customers have used its software to protect investments and ease transitions to technologies including NVMe.

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The company presented a session titled: Software-Defined Storage and the Customer Path to NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) that will highlight its SDS enterprise data services and demonstrate the ease of provisioning and auto-tiering any mix of NVMe or SCSI-based storage pools to Windows and Linux hosts.

Additionally, the firm previewed initial ‘pre-tuning’ I/Ometer performance results for enterprise data services and storage delivered ‘over the NVMe-oF wire’ and a wire trace showing less than 0.015ms latency. (presentation).

NVMe and NVMe-oF technology promises new levels of performance for flash-based storage systems. However, for large, distributed systems, the problem remains of deploying, managing, and migrating data and applications. Software-defined storage can provide a basis for managing all types of storage at the speed required to realize the benefits of NVMe.

A software-defined storage solution can eliminate changes to hosts, provide QoSs, automate data migration, support NVMe with the existing fabric network, and provide a range of enterprise data services such as CDP, load-balancing, HA mirroring, auto-tiering, and data migration.

The company’s software-defined storage solution allows for the adoption of varied implementations of NVMe including local SSDs and NVMe over FC using standard HBAs, and end-to-end NVMe for workloads demanding minimum latency.

While there is always the need for more performance, customers have been slow to adopt NVMe-oF since there is a lack of software services and a path for businesses to transition without suffering the costs and disruptions required to benefit from this technology. Instead, customers are forced into a ‘rip and replace’ abandonment of current investments. The firm’s software-defined storage platform is a bridge that unifies and abstracts legacy and new storage. It allows customers to integrate new technologies like NVMe-oF and gain the benefits without having to sacrifice past investments.

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Customers worldwide have used the company’s software solutions across diverse storage devices spanning multiple generations. Its software-defined storage, powered by patented adaptive parallel I/O technology, maximizes utilization of multi-core processors to solve the I/O bottleneck in order to achieve even greater productivity and further consolidation of server technology by allowing more applications, VMs and workloads to run.

By doing so, the company able to cut latency and drive the most I/O performance from both existing storage systems and all flash arrays and NVMe devices which support a much higher level of device parallelism, enabling IT departments to get maximum performance and value from their investments.

Ressources:
SANsymphony Software-Defined Storage
If I Use NVMe, Why Do I Still Need Parallel I/O?