StorONE announced integration of NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) as a feature to its S1 Enterprise Storage Platform, providing organizations with the lower IO latency between hosts and a storage system over a network while eliminating the need to migrate data to an entirely new system.

NVMe is a method of accessing storage media designed to provide reductions in latency and increase the number of devices in large solutions. The NVMe-oF specification extends NVMe onto suitable storage fabrics such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand. While it should be no more complex to enable than adding SMB to NFS, many vendors struggle to efficiently support multiple protocols simultaneously within their storage systems. These legacy providers often find it difficult to optimize their IO engine for the extremely low latency of NVMe-oF. In these cases, customers are forced to move to entirely new products to achieve the benefits of the protocol.

StorONE delivers NVMe-oF as a mouse click, directly integrating it into the S1 Enterprise Storage Platform. Because of the company's extensive R&D investment, StorONE's complete development and support of NVMe-oF was achieved within 6 months. Its implementation supports NVMe-oF over TCP and Ethernet RDMA to significantly reduce IO latency while supporting all block IO features, including high availability and asymmetric active-active failover. Existing customers, after upgrading, can take advantage of NVMe-oF using existing hardware allowing them to forego unwieldy data migrations.

The S1 Enterprise Storage Platform consolidates organizational storage infrastructures while dramatically reducing costs. It provides IT professionals with a solution that exceeds the objectives of software-defined storage, creating a storage platform that meets all present storage needs and is ready for future innovation. Its flexibility means customers can start their consolidation journey by using StorONE as a backup storage target, enabling them to extract the full benefit of modern backup software. Leveraging the platform's protocol flexibility, customers can use this backup storage target as a production-class standby storage system and then add additional use cases like NAS, VMware, Oracle and MS-SQL at a later date.

"Too often companies are forced to undergo major hardware and software refreshes to gain the benefits of new storage technologies because their vendors either lack the capability of upgrading their existing solutions or because they have made a business decision to exploit such needs," said Gal Naor, CEO and co-founder of StorONE. "At StorONE, we believe that customers should always be able to enjoy maximum data protection and optimal workload placement at the lowest TCO. By integrating the NVMe-oF protocol into our existing platform rather than create a new product for organizations to purchase, we are better able to fulfill our mission of turning storage from an IT cost center to a resource that provides critical competitive advantages."