Dell Technologies World: Virtual Instruments, Dell EMC, Cisco and SANBlaze Announce that NVMe-oF Ready for Enterprise

Together with Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies, Cisco Systems, Inc., and SANBlaze Technologies, Inc., Virtual Instruments, Inc. announced that the NVMe-oF storage protocol is ready for the enterprise.

The four NVMe-oF innovators will showcase the complete ecosystem to accelerate enterprise NVMe-oF adoption – from testing to deployment – through a collaborative demo at Dell Technologies World, taking place in Las Vegas, NV, on April 29 – May 2 2019.

NVMe is considered one of the most disruptive innovations in the storage industry since flash storage, as it promises to reduce latency and increase performance far beyond existing SAS-based flash systems.

NVMe-oF extends that performance boost over current storage infrastructures. However, until now, it faced challenges to widespread adoption in the enterprise sector with limited product availability and uncertainty with respect to the actual benefits. Enterprise IT leaders have been facing challenging decisions, including which workloads will benefit the most, how to select the right products, and how to mitigate risk during migration due to the limited supporting ecosystem.

At Dell Technologies World, the companies will demonstrate how the four companies have collaborated to eliminate these challenges to make NVMe-oF enterprise-ready. The demo will simulate an NVMe-based, workload-heavy enterprise environment, which will consist of the following technologies:

• Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom infrastructure monitoring and AIO/s platform

• Virtual Instruments’ WorkloadWisdom storage performance validation platform

PowerMax 200

• Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe storage

Cisco MDS 9300 Series Multilayer Fabric switches

• Cisco MDS 9100 Series 32Gb Multilayer Fabric switches

Cisco San Telemetry Streaming architecture
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• Cisco SAN Analytics and SAN Telemetry Streaming

SANBlaze VirtuaLUN storage emulation

• SANBlaze VirtuaLUN storage emulation

The environment will feature Cisco’s MDS switches, which are sold and serviced by Dell EMC under the Connectrix MDS brand, connected to PowerMax arrays, with the massive simulated load generated by the combination of WorkloadWisdom storage workload modeling and analytics, integrated with the SANBlaze VirtuaLUN load generator.

The entire environment will be monitored from end-to-end by VirtualWisdom, which will showcase agentless integrations to Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming (NVMe-oF), and NVMe-oF PowerMax that collect, monitor, correlate and analyse from the application servers, to the PowerMax. SAN Telemetry Streaming provides on-switch, in-band monitoring of NVMe-oF I/O storage traffic.

By showcasing NVMe-oF performance for the enterprise in a tested and monitored environment, the demo will illustrate how the integrated ecosystem of the companies is making NVMe-oF viable for enterprise data centres.

For example, the latest Cisco 32Gb MDS switches support both FC and NVMe running in the same chassis, along with SAN Telemetry Streaming (STS), enabling IT leaders to reduce the risk of migration to NVMe-based storage such as the latest PowerMax arrays. As a result, the four companies are poised to help accelerate the adoption of NVMe in the enterprise for-performance mission-critical applications.

In addition to the multi-company demo, Virtual Instruments will have a presence at the event. At his booth, there will be interactive demos of VirtualWisdom and WorkloadWisdom, as well as a showcase of the company’s professional services, including the Cloud Migration Readiness service and the Infrastructure Performance Assessment service. In addition, one of the firm’s healthcare customers, Houston Methodist, will lead a presentation focused on best practices around infrastructure management for mission-critical applications: What Best Practices for Infrastructure Management for Mission-Critical Apps.

“NVMe is the future of high-end storage in the enterprise, but as is the case with many emerging technologies, the cost/performance benefit analysis will be the driver of enterprise adoption,” said Travis Vigil, SVP, product management, Dell EMC. “Our collaboration with Virtual Instruments, Cisco and SANBlaze will illustrate why enterprises can now rely on NVMe as the storage foundation of their modern hybrid data centres.“

“Cisco has been a technology leader for NVMe over FC and Ethernet. NVMe delivers significant scale, latency, performance improvements, and overall better storage integration for our data center customers,” said Thomas Scheibe, VP, product management, data centre, Cisco. “Together with Virtual Instruments and other ecosystem partners, Cisco will demonstrate the delivery of FC-NVMe and SAN Insights Streaming on the Cisco MDS storage switch product line, enabling end-to-end NVMe connectivity and fabric performance monitoring.“

“Enterprises require end-to-end validation of their storage networks and systems, and this is especially true of a highly advanced technology such as NVMe,” said Vince Asbridge, president and CEO, SANBlaze. “By collaborating with Virtual Instruments, Dell EMC and Cisco, we’re able to give enterprises the peace of mind they need to forge ahead with their NVMe deployments.“

“Enterprise IT leaders are eager to evaluate next-generation, NVMe-based storage systems that can scale to meet the massive performance requirements for big data, IoT and AI-based applications,” said John Gentry, CTO and SVP, business development, Virtual Instruments. “But beyond the performance of NVMe, enterprises rightfully want to be sure that it is also a cost-effective and low-risk approach for their mission-critical applications. Through our collaboration with Dell EMC, Cisco and SANBlaze, we’re able to demonstrate that NVMe is now enterprise-grade – which enables enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.“