Five Important Advances in AFA Technology

This article, published on June 25, 2020, was written by Ken Clipperton, lead analyst for storage, DCIG LLC.

Five Important Advances in AFA Technology

DCIG recently updated its research into enterprise AFAs and will soon publish the DCIG 2020-21 Enterprise AFA Buyer’s Guide. As it reflects on what has changed since publishing the prior edition in 2018, 5 advances in AFA technology that seem especially significant. Any business planning to refresh its storage infrastructure should take these advances into consideration.

NVMe and NVMe-oF Accelerate Storage Access
A new gen of enterprise AFAs are delivering order of magnitude latency improvements compared to the first gen of AFAs. Three developments account for most of these improvements:
• Vendors optimized storage OSs to take advantage of NVMe parallelism
• Use of the NVMe protocol to transfer data to SSDs
• Use of NVMe-oF and NVMe/FC to transfer data to application servers

The first gen of AFAs connected to flash memory via disk-oriented SATA or SAS protocols. These arrays often achieved I/O latencies as low as one 1μs. For many enterprises, this provided a 10x improvement over legacy HDD-based arrays.

Storage Class Memory
Some enterprise storage systems have used NVDIMMs as a low-latency, yet persistent, cache for many years. These NVDIMMs marry DRAM and flash memory on a card that fits into a normal memory slot on the system motherboard. During normal operations, all I/O activity occurs in DRAM. On power loss or shutdown, the contents of the DRAM are copied to the on-board flash memory. While very useful for safely accelerating storage operations, this technology has been limited to no more than 32GB per NVDIMM.

New storage class memory technologies are making their way into enterprise storage systems in both NVDIMM and SSD formats. An Intel Optane DC persistent memory DIMM can place up to 512GB in the same memory slot. Only 1 array DCIG researched currently uses this technology. However, 7 of the arrays we researched use storage class memory in SSD format. In the SSD format, capacity increases to 1.6TB. Some arrays use these low-latency SSDs as storage, others use them as large secondary caches.

Persistent Storage for Containers
Much of the new software development in enterprises targets containerized environments. Unlike many of the workloads native to public clouds, many of these applications require persistent storage. Since 2018, the ability of enterprise AFAs to provide persistent storage to these new containerized workloads has increased from 61% to 76% of all AFAs.

New Deployment Options
All of the arrays DCIG researched are available as traditional physical appliances. What has changed is that 16% of these products are available as a software-defined array instance in public cloud infrastructures. Thus, all the data services businesses rely on are now available in the cloud and with performance that is much better than traditional cloud storage. This change is a significant enabler for enterprises to move critical workloads to the cloud.

Storage-as-a-Service Options
Storage vendors have made significant changes in how enterprises can acquire and manage enterprise storage.  They are offering new storage-as-a-service (STaaS) options. In STaaS deployments, the vendor is responsible for maintaining the underlying storage system, freeing business IT staff to manage the business’s data rather than managing the infrastructure. More than one-third (36%) of the AFAs we researched are available for on-premises STaaS.

Many vendors also offer STaaS in colocation facilities that are near public cloud data centers and provide high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity to the public cloud. This is a way for the vendor to provide their customers with hybrid cloud and multi-cloud storage. 12% of the AFAs we research are available as STaaS in colocation facilities.

Why it Matters?
Any business planning to refresh its storage infrastructure should take these advances into consideration. These advances can increase the performance density of any data center, align IT infrastructure with current software development practices, and support hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud business initiatives while freeing up IT staff from day-to-day management of the underlying storage system.