Old school Fibre Channel gets new lesson in NVMe treatment

FC-NVMe has been demoed over Fibre Channel by Brocade and QLogic, with the system effectively the PCIe bus protocol in standard form used for solid state memory, Non-Volatile Memory Express, and deployed as a network fabric external to a server's PCIe bus over Fibre Channel. The idea seems to be that servers can enjoy access …

[Hurn]

Seems to me, the latency reductions will initially come from the host side stack.

An NVMe driver (with streamlined instructions) should reduce latency over the traditional SCSI / FC HBA driver stack. This should be the easy part.

Next up would be the storage end. Would need NVMe direct to storage (flash or whatever) instead of some NVME to SCSI to flash, which would probably be the 1st gen implementation.

Reducing latencies at either end will help, but there would still be the FC fabric limitations / latencies.

[chris coreline]

I know of at least three All Flash array vendors using NVMe on the back end. We can assume everyone is getting ready to switch stack from SCSI... Honestly, m not sure it would be a massive job when you look at the other features these vendors have airdropped into their arrays...

[chris coreline]

too early to think of a relovent pun

There's life in the old dog yet! I was starting to come to terms with the twilight years of FC but it looks like this will give the lads a reason to push for 128G