Most organizations are managing record amounts of data while trying to satisfy the need to access it on-demand through various analytic and operational systems. To meet these expectations in near-real time, they don’t just need the best data storage technologies on the market today—they also must anticipate what will be available 18 to 24 months from now so they don’t limit their future success.
Traditionally, the storage network hasn’t been the limiting factor in application performance. But the advent of solid-state flash-based storage has changed that. Once considered insufficient for mission-critical environments, flash is now aggressively being deployed for all application types in data centers around the globe. It has not only shown itself to be reliable, it has proven to be an essential technology in handling rapidly increasing data growth.
But flash storage alone isn’t enough to prepare you for future data volumes. Replacing old storage with faster storage without also modernizing the storage fabric simply shifts the performance bottleneck to the network. And as flash devices get faster and larger, this bottleneck could significantly limit the effectiveness of your storage investments.
For example, on the near-term horizon is a new technology called Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), a super-fast communications protocol designed specifically to move data on and off high-speed solid-state storage media. NVMe SSDs will be one or two orders of magnitude faster than current SSD devices, putting enormous strain on any already over-burdened legacy networks.
Likewise, NVMe over Fabrics is a new protocol standard that allows NVMe traffic to run concurrently over storage fabrics like Fibre Channel or Ethernet. This opens the significant performance gains of NVMe to networked storage arrays. When native NVMe-ready storage arrays hit the market this year, you’ll need NVMe-ready infrastructure, including your storage fabric.
Fortunately, this technology upgrade will be very simple if you’ve already upgraded to an NVMe-ready Gen 6 Fibre Channel 32 Gbps storage network and host bus adapters. Because NVMe traffic can run concurrently over a Fibre Channel network, adding new NVMe traffic is seamless, just like adding any new storage device—only much faster.
Both Gen 5 and Gen 6 Fibre Channel support NVMe traffic, and upgrading now will prepare your data center for the plug-and-play NVMe arrays as soon as they hit the market. Upgrading will also position you for a seamless transition to Gen 7 Fibre Channel when you’re ready.
The good news is that you likely don’t need to rip and replace your entire infrastructure as you introduce the latest storage advancements. Once you’ve deployed a modern storage network, it should provide a flexible platform to allow rapid deployment of new applications and services, while offering backward compatibility.
To be sure, IT leaders are facing challenging decisions with the onset of significant new storage technologies. But a strategic, modern storage network can go a long way toward addressing an unpredictable future—and be integral to your survival in the digital economy.
For more guidance on modern storage strategies, visit our Network World blog page.
To learn more about Brocade’s advanced storage networking solutions, visit us here.
