QLogic and Brocade demonstrated a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) over Fabrics solution using Fibre Channel as the fabric.
The demonstration, which is an industry first, is based on the draft specification of NVMe over Fabrics under definition by the NVM Express, Inc. organization and the draft Fibre Channel over NVMe (FC-NVMe) standards under definition by T11.
The companies said this FC-NVMe proof of concept (POC) sets a foundation for lower latency and increased performance, while providing improved fabric integration for flash-based storage.
NVMe provides a standards-based approach for PCI Express (PCIe) solid state drive (SSD) access that significantly improves performance by reducing latency and streamlining the command set while providing support for security and end-to-end data protection. NVMe over Fabrics defines an efficient mechanism to utilize these devices in large scale storage deployments and provides investment protection by allowing the latest in innovations and advances in low latency SSD flash to be used over proven Fibre Channel fabrics. This enables the NVMe storage devices to be shared, pooled and managed more effectively.
“Next-generation data intensive workloads are utilizing low latency NVMe flash-based storage to meet ever increasing user demand,” said Vikram Karvat, vice president of products, marketing and planning, QLogic. “By combining the lossless, highly deterministic nature of Fibre Channel with NVMe, FC-NVMe targets the performance, application response time, and scalability needed for next generation data centers, while leveraging existing Fibre Channel infrastructures. QLogic is pioneering this effort with industry leaders, which in time, will yield significant operational benefits to data center operators and IT managers.”
