Toshiba Memory America, fresh from from its sale to a Bain-led consortium that includes Apple, Dell and Seagate, is bullish about the future of NVMe-oF as it pushes forward with promotion of its KumoScale software.
KumoScale facilitates the deployment of NVMe-oF in the data center, optimizing the performance of flash storage over orchestration frameworks.
“The cloud was built on Direct Attached Storage SSDs due to their low cost and ease of deployment,” Toshiba said at the time of Kumoscale’s launch at the Open Compute Project U.S. Summit back in March. “However, customers are finding the fixed nature of DAS inhibits the flexibility promised by the adoption of containers and orchestration frameworks.”
Toshiba launched KumoScale at Open Compute Project’s U.S. summit earlier this year
In response, KumoScale allows cloud data centers “to scale and provision server and flash storage independently to accommodate unexpected and peak workloads,” facilitating high-performance storage for container orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes as well as proprietary provisioning systems, the company states.
According to Toshiba, NVMe-oF is superior to direct attached storage because it reduces the incidence of stranded storage or compute power by optimizing the allocation of storage capacity and performance to each node.
KumoScale has the potential to bring “networked storage to near-peak performance,” wrote Storage Review of the software in May.
PICKING UP PACE
Toshiba and Marvell welcomed their joint award
in the storage networking category at FMS
Things are moving fast for KumoScale, literally. At the recent Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Toshiba Memory America welcomed its best of show award for KumoScale in the storage networking category, won in conjunction with technology company Marvell for their joint NVMe-oF over TCP Disaggregated Cloud solution.
“We are working hard to enable cloud data centers to maximize flash resources and to accelerate the adoption of disaggregated flash by adding NVMe over TCP capability to KumoScale,” said Toshiba’s Oded Ilan, who previously worked on virtualized server flash software at OCZ before its acquisition by Toshiba in 2013, according to reporting by The Register.
Speaking during FMS, Christopher Moezzi of Marvell said NVMe-oF TCP using Marvell’s FastLinQ Ethernet solutions would enable “customer investments in flash to scale over existing networks“ and “accelerate access to shared pools of NVMe storage by delivering a wide choice of fabrics.”
THE IMPACT OF NVME ON HDD
For its part, Seagate agrees on the growing importance of NVMe. The company’s David Allen described as “critical” the availability of an open and collaborative standard such as NVMe that “not only serves high-end enterprise storage, but also services client and mobile solutions.”
The game isn’t over for HDD any time soon though. Toshiba may be heavily invested in the ongoing adoption of SSD technology and supporting protocols such as NVMe, but it is quick to acknowledge–alongside Seagate–that hard disk drives will continue to have a central role to play in the data center mix.
Writing recently in StorageNewsletter.com, Rainer Kaese of Toshiba Electronics Europe carefully demonstrated the lower cost per terabyte and expanded capacity of HDD under test conditions compared with the higher sequential R/W speeds and random I/Os of SSD.
Stephen Buckler of Horizon Technology agrees that pricing around storage is an important variable but always needs to be viewed in terms of ROI when it comes to purchasing decisions.
“The performance advantage of SSD is undeniable but limited by using SAS/SATA interfaces that were designed to support HDD,” Buckler wrote earlier this month. “NVMe was specifically designed to take advantage of NAND-based storage. However there were still drawbacks. NVMe could not be used across fabric or in a virtualized system.”
“With the release of NVM Express 1.3, support of virtualization and NVMe over fabric are big wins, broadening NVMe’s appeal. Not only do you get the speed of NVMe, you eliminate the SAS/SATA controller and certain switches.”
“As NAND and SSD prices fall and NVME becomes easier to deploy, expect to see increased use of NVMe now that all flash arrays can be deployed in a virtualized environment,” he remarked.
