Excelero, the NVMe-over-Fabrics flash array software startup, has announced a scale-up NVEdge product to complement its scale-out NVMESH offering.
NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) extends the PCIe/NVMe protocol across network links so a server application can access remote flash drives for block data as if they were local. This is much faster than accessing the drives across iCSCI or Fibre Channel protocol links.
Excelero’s scale-out software adds NVMESH storage nodes to an existing set of nodes to manage data growth potentially requiring tens of thousands of nodes. A scale-up offering adds NVMe drives to an existing system, at rack or sub-rack level. Scalability lis imited by the number of drive bays available in the system’s enclosures.
The Edge for Excelero ranges from a smart device through remote and branch offices to a small data centre; – think five to 1,000 servers accessing an array.
NVEdge needs to run on dual X86 controller-based commodity storage arrays with high availability. The software is based in part on open SPDK, and supports SmartNICs such as Mellanox’ BlueField and Broadcom’ Stingray.
It provides:
- Thin provisioning up to 1,000x
- Support for RDMA and NVMe over TCP/IP networking
- Data protection – RAID 10
- Checksums
Excelero said OEMs and system integrators will build the systems using Intel and AMD processors. Current partners include Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Quanta, SuperMicro and Western Digital.
An NVEdge array can deliver up to 2.7m IOPS across a 100Gbit/s link using 4K blocks.
Scale-up
According to Excelero co-founder and CEO Lior Gal, the scale-up NVEdge system is comparable to scale-up NVMe-oF systems from AWS-acquired E8, StorCentre’s Vexata, and Pavilion Data Systems. They are all appliances, he says, and Excelero’s advantages include easier deployment and use of standard hardware.
Appliance vendors with new technology find it difficult to scale their businesses and Excelero, with its scale-out technology is already past that barrier, Gal argued.
He hinted that we might expect NVMESH systems to include NVEdge units in some way.
EXTEN Technologies, the revived Mangstor, has announced its HyperDynamic NVMe-oF array software for use by OEMs and that will compete with NVEdge.
NVEdge is available to select partners immediately and is on show at this week’s 2019 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara.
