Reply to post: NetApp really does have the first enterprise class end-to-end NVMe offering

NetApp really does have the first enterprise class end-to-end NVMe offering

It's a minor point, but IBM doesn't have end to end NVMe in it's flash system products because their proprietary flash modules dont use NVMe, and the winner of the "we built it first" bragging rights still goes to NetApp because the EF570 announced NVMe over infiniband support a month or two ahead of IBM

Of course the creators of DSSD deserve a lot of kudos for doing a lot of early work in this area and releasing a product, but it was for a fairly niche HPC style use-case which required special software to be installed on hosts, proprietary interconnects etc which made if unsuitable for the vast majority of enterprise use cases. The same could be argued to a lesser extent for the EF570 and IBM infiniband based NMVeF implementations too. Great for HPC where Infiniband rules, but less so for the enterprise where Fibre Channel dominates.

The key here is that for anyone with Gen-6 Fibre channel (released in 2016, so there's a decent number of datacenters already running Gen-6 gear) can immediately start using NVMeF to ONTAP 9.4 based arrays with Gen-6 FC cards in them, (including the A300, A700) which will reduce the CPU load on the hosts from I/O and give a tidy improvement in overall latency. Furthermore if you want the goodness of full end-to-end NVMe to get those final hundred or two microseconds of latency improvement, the AF800 will give that to you today. Given that the A700 with SAS connected SSD easily outperformed the top-end array from a competitor using NVMe connected SSD's, this should put the A800 firmly in the lead as the fastest enterprise class array in the market.