NVMe over Fabrics brings benefits of NVMe to shared storage
Summary
FC and iSCSI have been great at delivering low latency for shared storage in a world built on disk-based and hybrid arrays.So, the industry developed NVMe as a direct access protocol to connect fast storage via the PCI Express bus of the server, with much less overhead than used to be seen with the SCSI-based SAS and SATA.Front-end connectivity in the Kaminario product supports NVMeover Fabrics, Fibre Channel and iSCSI with a claimed performance level of around 100µs.There are “retrofitted” traditional arrays, new architectures that disaggregate or otherwise look to remove the bottleneck of the controller, and rack-scale solutions that consolidate connectivity into a single chassis.Where the I/O path has been heavily optimised the performance of solutions with Nand flash or Intel Optane is not much greater than the overhead of the media itself.