Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Zivan Ori, CEO, E8 Storage
The Proliferation of NVMe, Ethernet, and All-Flash Arrays
From
my view at E8 Storage, I see a few things happening in the storage market that
indicate shifts in standards, protocols and drives in 2018.
The
NVMe protocol will become the standard for solid state drives over time. Single
port 2.5" and PCIe card NVMe form factors have already been incorporated
into server offerings from all major vendors, with higher performance than SATA
for nearly equal $/GB. Dual port 2.5" form factor NVMe SSDs will drive the
adoption of NVMe in storage systems, and adoption will accelerate as the $/GB
approaches that of SAS SSDs.
As
the NVMe protocol becomes more prevalent, various standards are emerging to
support the NVMe protocol over various transport mediums (RoCE, Infiniband, FC,
etc). Early variants of the standards have already been brought to market by
emerging storage vendors such as E8 Storage. However, 2018 will see broader
deployment of NVMe-compliant offerings from established vendors.
High-speed
Ethernet continues to outpace other storage protocols, and will increase as
data traffic is increasingly moved to Ethernet. Infrastructure hardware such as
network adapters and Ethernet switches capable of 200Gb/s were introduced in
2017, and field deployments should begin in 2018 enterprise data centers update
their networks.
Lastly,
the introduction of very high-capacity SSDs in 2016 and 2017, as well as the
continued cost reduction curve (2016/17 supply shortages notwithstanding), are
fueling the transition of all flash arrays from niche applications to general
purpose computing across the data centers, as we head into 2018. Many workloads
previously run on HDD are either moving to all flash arrays, or alternatively
moving to cloud-based services.
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About the Author
Zivan Ori, CEO & Co-Founder, E8 Storage
Mr. Zivan Ori is the co-founder and CEO of E8 Storage.
Before founding E8 Storage, Mr. Ori held the position of IBM XIV R&D
Manager, being responsible for developing the IBM XIV high-end, grid-scale
storage system, and served as Chief Architect at Stratoscale, a provider of hyper-converged
infrastructure. Prior to IBM XIV, Mr. Ori headed Software Development at Envara
(acquired by Intel) and served as VP R&D at Onigma (acquired by McAfee).