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NVMe: The key to faster cloud and edge performance

  Western Digital   January 27, 2021

Designed for high performance and non-volatile storage media, NVMe is the only protocol that stands out in highly demanding and compute intensive enterprise, cloud and edge data ecosystem.

The financial services created a fully functioning digitized bank account in minutes. E-commerce players experimented with Machine Learning (ML) in the areas like catalog qualities, product size recommendations, and prevention of fraud orders. Players like Netflix and Amazon of the digital world changed the way people consumed content and media.

This was the world before the pandemic outbreak. The crisis pushed companies over the technology tipping point—and transformed business forever.

As markets bounce back, the digital transformation is going to be an even bigger and a more urgent imperative. The road to recovery will be paved with data that will provide the fuel to power better and faster decisions.

The growth in data has been exponential, and it has shown no signs of slowing down. To process this growing data in shorter and shorter time periods, data centers will need to adopt new storage architectures to meet the dual goals of size and speed. This becomes increasingly significant not only for cloud data centers but also as data architecture changes from the core to the edge.

NVMeTM: The future of cloud storage

For several years, storage technology progress was measured primarily in terms of capacity and speed. No longer. In recent times, those steadfast benchmarks have been augmented, and even superseded, by sophisticated new technologies and methodologies that make storage smarter, more flexible and easier to manage.

Non-Volatile Memory Express or NVMeTM has emerged as the next evolution in storage connectivity and protocol to be adopted by enterprises. It is a new storage access and transport protocol for flash and next-generation solid-state drives (SSDs) that delivers the highest throughput and fastest response times for all types of enterprise workloads. Many in the industry believe that it is displacing all other storage interfaces in data centers for performance critical applications.
NVMe storage is already being used in business scenarios where every microsecond counts ─ from real-time customer interactions such as finance, e-commerce, and software sales agents to AI, ML, big data, and advanced analytics apps to DevOps ─ enabling enterprises to run more iterations in less time.

The unique features of NVMe are helping enterprises to avoid the usual bottlenecks. It not only offers significantly higher performance and lower latencies for existing applications than legacy protocols, but also enables new capabilities for real-time data processing in the data center, cloud and the emerging edge computing environments.

Companies from the healthcare and telecom are leveraging NVMe for fast and complex workloads since they nearly eliminate processor wait times when reading data from storage. Finance companies use NVMe as extra storage to accelerate high transaction volumes. Having said this, it is not limited to one specific type of workload since it improves performance for other applications as well.

With its blazing speed, NVMe blurs the distinction between storage and memory. In other words, the actual data can be treated as if it was an extension of memory for the data center. With the arrival of NVMe-oFTM (NVMe over Fabrics) organizations can now create a very high-performance storage network with latencies that rival direct attached storage (DAS).

In today’s global digital economy, every microseconds count. As hyperscale cloud and enterprise data centers constantly work to ensure uncompromised performance and availability of essential applications, while also keeping pace with unprecedented data growth, customer adoption of NVMe and NVMe-oF solutions will continue to accelerate.

Western Digital: Reshaping the cloud and edge with NVMe innovations

Western Digital, with its long history of NAND Flash innovation and an integrated portfolio of NVMe SSDs and new data fabrics solutions, is well-positioned to enable customers fully embrace NVMe and get the most out of their storage assets.

Take the case of Ultrastar© DC SN840 Gen3.1 NVMe SSD, which is Western Digital’s third-generation solution with a vertically integrated in-house NVMe controller, firmware and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND technology. The solution meets all the needs of mission-critical applications that require superior read/write and mixed workload performance, low latency and dual-port high availability, including high-performance computing (HPC), cloud computing, SQL/NoSQL databases, virtualisation (VMs/containers), AI/ML and data analytics.

Traditional data centre infrastructure can limit the full potential of NVMe SSDs, resulting in underutilisation of storage resources, inefficient data silos and costly operational expenses. Western Digital’s storage platform OpenFlexTM Data24 NVMe-oF enables the full bandwidth of Ultrastar NVMe SSDs to be shared by multiple hosts over a low-latency Ethernet fabric as if they were locally attached to the PCIe bus inside x86 servers. By achieving this data centre operators can scale-up capacity and more efficiently utilise disaggregated Flash storage to achieve greater performance. Apart from these products, Western Digital has a suite of new NVMe SSDs for enabling next-generation, data-centric architectures for data centers, industrial IoT, automotive and client applications.

The future of flash is undoubtedly NVMe as it is all about speed, efficiency, capacity and cost-effective scalability, and with the availability of NVMe-oF it takes to the next level.

Designed for high performance and non-volatile storage media, NVMe is the only protocol that stands out in highly demanding and compute intensive enterprise, cloud and edge data ecosystem. It is not only revolutionizing storage, but it is changing the way IT teams view both storage and memory.

To know more on how Western Digital portfolio brings more choice, better cost efficiencies, and superior solutions for data architect, visit the following resources.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this feature article are of the author. This is not meant to be an advisory to purchase or invest in products, services or solutions of a particular type or, those promoted and sold by a particular company, their legal subsidiary in India or their channel partners. No warranty or any other liability is either expressed or implied.
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