Storage Solutions: NVMe Explained
If you don’t need NVMe now, you eventually will.
Storage is all about data—saving and retrieving information. For years, hard drives comprised of spinning disks met both business and consumer needs for preserving data. However, applications grow larger and more complicated, and the volumes of data that enterprises generate expand exponentially. Every day.
Technological advances helped to address these needs. Generations of Serial ATA (SATA), a command and transport protocol for transferring data between a computer's motherboard and storage devices like hard drives or optical disks, accelerated throughput. But the drives themselves proved to be a bottleneck. CPUs could process data faster than the drives could supply them.
Enter a game-changing innovation—solid-state flash drives (SSDs).
SSDs, without any moving parts, provided faster reads and writes than spinning disks. They also consume less power and generate less heat, lowering operational costs in data centers.
Initially, SSDs were much more expensive per gigabyte of storage than hard drives, but their costs have been decreasing, enabling widespread adoption.
However, a problem remained: SSDs were deployed in infrastructures designed for spinning disks. While SSDs improved throughput, the technologies around them limited their performance.
Certainly, inserting SSDs into legacy environments helped promote adoption. Enterprises didn’t have to replace existing solutions wholesale, containing implementation costs.
But a new bottleneck emerged—the speed at which the CPU and storage solutions could communicate. The culprit was SATA, even in its latest version. SATA was fine for hard drives but wasn’t designed for SSDs, constraining their potential.
What is NVMe?
What came to the rescue is Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe).
NVMe is a relatively new and open transfer protocol designed specifically for SSDs that connect to the CPU via the high-speed Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI Express) bus.
PCIe slots directly link to the CPU, providing extremely high-speed data paths to storage.
NVMe is not bleeding-edge technology. The first NVMe spec was issued in 2011, has been updated through multiple specs, and is being adopted globally.
What are the advantages of NVMe technology?
Performance and efficiencies. NVMe is designed to support up to 65,535 I/O queues, each capable of 64,000 concurrent commands.
In contrast, legacy SATA and SAS can support only single queues with 32 and 254 entries, respectively.
Moreover, as a NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) storage protocol, NVMe enables multiple CPUs to share the queues.
Is NVMe truly faster?
NVMe has proven to provide up to seven times faster data transfers between hosts and storage than SSDs using the SATA protocol.
NVMe solid-state drives are ideal for data-intensive enterprise applications that demand immense bandwidth, higher IOPS, and very low latency.
These include:
- High-performance computing
- Consumer-facing e-commerce and financial apps
- Big-data apps like AI, advanced analytics, and machine learning
- Media and entertainment workflows
The future of storage
SSDs are becoming denser with technologies like QLC (Quad Level Cell) and upcoming PLC (Penta-Level Cell).
Denser storage is less durable, making RAID for NVMe storage systems an important consideration to ensure data safety.
NVMe Across the Network
NVMe works between CPUs and SSDs but can also extend across networks with NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF).
NVMe-oF enables host devices to communicate with storage systems over greater distances via Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks, offering low-latency data access.
The future is about big, fast data. NVMe and NVMe-oF will empower this future.
