Pure Storage Delivering NVMe-oF RoCE on AFA

Pure Storage, Inc. added new DirectFlash Fabric capability for end-to-end NVMe and NVMe-oF support in Purity 5.2, the software-defined engine of its FlashArray//X products.

This capability extends Pure’s leadership in empowering customers to approach hybrid cloud with a new level of unified infrastructure – to run apps anywhere and protect data everywhere.

DirectFlash Fabric enables customers to improve performance of enterprise mission critical applications as well as new web-scale applications that traditionally have relied on DAS. With this announcement, the company becomes the first mainstream enterprise storage provider to support NVMe-oF RoCE, which enables enterprises to get flash media closer to applications for more real-time access and greater consolidation.

Modern enterprises are challenged to deliver innovations and services that can keep up with a constantly fast-moving society – with no downtime allowed. According to Google, 53% of mobile users will leave a site that takes over threes to load. Applications must be available and accessible at all times. To provide a consistently amazing user experience, enterprises must cost-efficiently support widespread deployment of applications that span clouds, break free of silos and drive the benefits of an innovation platform both in the cloud and on-premises.

“The future is delivering applications and services at the speed of thought,” said Chadd Kenney, VP of product and solutions, Pure. “To do this, applications can no longer live within barriers, they must interact, intercommunicate and share datasets in real-time. Architectures must converge and break down the barriers that exist today. DirectFlash Fabric is a key component for helping enterprises unify SAN, DAS, and cloud.”

DirectFlash Fabric delivers optimization between storage controllers and hosts over fast networking and makes Ethernet a first class citizen in the data center for storage.

Other solutions today may not have full enterprise features enabled, or may utilize NVMe over Fabrics with FC rather than RDMA over converged Ethernet (RoCE), which offers the biggest potential jump in performance for Ethernet customers with a 50% latency reduction compared to iSCSI.  

With the new capability, Pure is extending its DirectFlash technologies to NVMe over Fabrics to enable increased efficiencies across the network, in particular with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and cloud-native, web-scale applications such as MongoDB, Cassandra and MariaDB get the benefits and efficiencies of enterprise grade shared storage.

FlashArray//X supports end-to-end NVMe on 25GbE and 50bE ports.

Interoperability with NVMe-oF-capable NICs is available or planned from Broadcom, Cisco, Marvell and Mellanox.

“As organizations undergo digital transformation and become more dependent on data and the ability to turn that data into compelling business insights, it is also driving a need to transform enterprise storage infrastructure to deliver better performance, availability and efficiency,” said Eric Burgener, research VP, infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies group, IDC. “NVMe technology will be at the core of that shift, and vendors like Pure Storage that can deliver true enterprise storage capabilities along with NVMe performance today give their customers the right infrastructure to build on for the future.“

On-Cloud, an emerging managed services provider, helps SMBs move applications to the cloud. After making the switch to Pure, it improved application performance for customers, simplified management and kept costs low.

“Pure’s continued investment in technologies like NVMe and NVMe-oF help us continue to innovate for our end-users. Our customers require high performance, enterprise-ready data service for all of their applications, including new cloud-native applications that we host,” said Esteban Rey, cloud evangelist, On-Cloud. “It’s critical that our data continues to serve a more strategic purpose for our business without added headcount or headache. With Pure on the back end, our systems have never worked better and our customers have never been happier.“