Sphere 3D Launches HVE Appliances Supporting NVMe

Sphere 3D Corp. announced its HVE appliances supporting NVMe technology.

These NVMe enabled appliances allow for over three times the drive read/write performance when compared to SSD only platforms, and are available as either converged and hyperconverged appliances or ‘Datrium Ready‘ open converged nodes.

The amount of data being stored and accessed continues to increase and the demands for faster processing, larger-capacity memory, and storage grow with it. Whether utilizing applications that leverage large quantities of data such as video or imagery, or legacy structured and unstructured data from financial, healthcare, and government verticals, the need for immediate access to this data is placing pressure on infrastructure in the data center to try and keep up. NVMe, often referred to as ‘Flash 2.0’, can be utilized for executing heavily loaded or mission-critical business applications and is a component of future data centers.

Adopting standardized protocols and interfaces like NVMe is an important next step in the popularization of flash SSD storage. Per G2M, Inc.‘ research, the NVMe market is growing fast, with a 95% CAGR rate and a forecast of 60% of enterprise storage appliances adopting the NVMe technology by 2020. NVMe provides a standard access method which reduces latency while improving storage performance.

“The HVE NVMe solution coupled with our proprietary software defined storage, our Desktop Cloud Orchestrator (DCO) software, and our VDI software is what differentiates our offering from others in the market,” said Dave Harmon, VP, virtualization. “Our introduction of these NVMe appliances furthers our mission to revolutionize the approach to virtualization of intense workloads like database access (OLTP), server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and high-transaction based applications.“

Availability and configurations:

• Available to order through authorized resellers and distributors in North America.

• 1U and 2U form factor with support for 50-800 virtual desktops.

• VMware Horizon View ready.

• Converged server virtualization nodes.

• Datrium Ready nodes.

• Scalable, 2U, four node platforms with support for 100GbE interfaces and price/performance levels.

The HVE NVMe appliances have technologies for on-board I/O priority scheduling adjustment, large block sequential write, global garbage collection, and other utilities to achieve predictable 500µs latency. With endurance ratings of 3 ^(1,2) DWPD and up to 17.5 ⁽³⁾ PBW per drive, NVMe provides a much-improved endurance and reliability solution per performance option than eMLC SSD technology. Able to deliver up to 800,000/200,000 R/W stable random IO/s ^(4,5) per drive with 88µs ⁽⁶⁾ latency.

⁽¹⁾ Five-year Endurance (DWPD, Disk Writes per Day): Disk write times per day over five years
⁽²⁾ DWPD endurance: 8KB alignment, 8KB data block, 100% random write
⁽³⁾ Maximum Data Written (PBW, Petabyte Writes): 100% random write tested with 4KB IO size and 4KB alignment
⁽⁴⁾ Bandwidth testing standard: RHEL 7.0 OS, FIO tool, one thread 512 QD 1MB data block sequential R/W
⁽⁵⁾ IO/s testing standard: RHEL 7.0 OS, FIO tool, eight thread/64 QD/4KB data block random R/W
⁽⁶⁾ Latency testing standard: RHEL 7.0 OS, FIO tool, 1 thread/1 QD/4KB data block random R/W