Enmotus Blog

Storage continues to be a volatile segment of IT. Hot areas trending in the news this month include NVMe over Fibre Channel, which is being hyped heavily now that the Broadcom acquisition of Brocade is a done deal. Another hot segment is the hyper-converged space, complimented by activity in software-defined storage from several vendors.

Flash is now running ahead of enterprise hard drives in the market, contributing to foundry changeovers to 3D NAND to temporarily put upward pressure on SSD pricing. High-performance storage solutions built on COTS platforms have been announced, too, which will create more pressure to reduce appliance prices.

Let’s cover these topics and more in detail:

1. NVMe over Fibre-Channel is in full hype mode right now. This solution is a major step away from traditional FC insofar as it no longer encapsulates the SCSI block-IO protocol. Instead, it uses a now-standard direct-memory access approach to reduce overhead and speed up performance significantly.

The storage industry continues to evolve rapidly, which is both exciting and challenging. I intend this blog to look at the hot news in the industry, as well as taking a view of trends and occasionally long-term directions.

This promises to be an interesting effort. There are plenty of innovations to describe, while retakes on older ideas crop up quite often. I hope you will find the subject as fascinating as I do.

Trends

1.It’s clear that the high performance enterprise hard drive is a dying breed. SSDs and all-flash arrays have undercut demand. With improved wear life, flash-based products meet the stringent needs of the datacenter plus, they are cooler, quieter and smaller and of course they are much faster.

Relevant news on this includes: