KIOXIA America, Inc. has added online volume migration to its KumoScale storage software based on NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) technology. Online volume migration is the latest feature added to KumoScale software's growing list of advanced storage functions. KIOXIA's KumoScale software suite makes it possible to achieve virtualization and management of high-performance flash at data center scale.

Volume migration - moving a storage volume from one SSD to another - typically requires temporarily removing the volume from service. This means that applications must be quiesced, and business operations must come to a halt for the duration of the data transfer. By enabling online volume migration, KumoScale software eliminates application downtime and user disruptions. Using KumoScale software, the volume to be moved remains online and continues to serve I/O while the process of moving the data to its new location proceeds. Volume migration is transparent to applications connected to the volume.

The target of a migration may be another drive within the same storage node or another storage node. During migration, writes are forwarded to the destination. When the transfer is complete, the host's connection is switched to the new target. When necessary, KumoScale software can split a volume and migrate a portion of it to enable SSD workloads to be managed at fine granularity when volume sizes are large.

"KumoScale software is architected to reliably deliver native NVMe-oF performance on shared commodity hardware," said Joel Dedrick, vice president and general manager, networked storage software, KIOXIA America, Inc. "For mission-critical applications, downtime due to maintenance can be extraordinarily costly. Eliminating the need for maintenance windows is just one of the ways that we help our customers maximize the returns on their data center investments."

Use Cases and Benefits

Volume migration can form the basis for a wide variety of functions integral to efficient storage management, including:

• QoS Management - in multi-tenant environments volumes can be migrated as needed for noisy neighbor abatement and SSD performance management
• Capacity rebalancing, snapshot/clone expansion, and thin-provisioned volume expansion
• Simplified maintenance, including drive replacement/upgrade, storage node maintenance, and software updates - volumes can be moved off drives with expiring warranties to enable replacement
• Global SSD wear management - volumes are migrated between physical drives and across storage nodes as needed to increase the life cycle of individual drives according to their remaining endurance

KIOXIA is a leading provider of NVMe SSDs, technology and data center software. For more information, please visit blog-us.kioxia.com/category/KumoScale or kumoscale.kioxia.com.