Posts by curtbeckmann

We pick a storage CTO's brains on Linux-heads, big vendors – and should all the admins NVMe?

The NVMe over FC cookbook you mentioned... plus iNVMe...

Good comments from Greg. The end of the article comments on the need for a cookbook to transition to FC-NVMe... There is such a book, though not much cooking is required, since recent SANs and HBAs offer concurrent support for both SCSI and NVMe over Fibre Channel. Check out "NVMe over Fibre Channel for Dummies", in ebook and print form. Full disclosure, I work at Brocade/Broadcom, and I'm one of the authors. There are several editions, some cobranded with storage OEMs along with Brocade. The book went to print before the NVMe-over-TCP spec effort got much attention. I agree with Muli that this will be a popular standard (when finalized, probably later this year) because, like FC-NVMe, it'll work on your existing infrastructure. Just as FC-SCSI and iSCSI coexisted for 15 years or so, you can expect FC-NVMe and "iNVMe" to coexist. That is, I see NVMe-over-TCP as exactly parallel to iSCSI, and so nickname the new protocol as "iNVMe", and I expect it'll be far more popular than the RDMA-based Ethernet options. Note that, as with iSCSI, there's still that gap around name services that Greg mentioned.

Well, FC-NVMe. Did this lightning-fast protocol just get faster?

First of many

Good to see this HPE announcement re FCNVMe... Storage vendors being (like their enterprise customers) a bit more conservative than your average tech start-up, they wait until their products have seen some early testing before they start pitching... Add in the need for some back-end architecture tweaks and it's very predictable that FCNVMe products announcements would lag other NVMe-over-Fabric announcements. For sure, buyers need more than "marketing slobber", but real-world numbers (more stable than the respectable 27us J_Metz mentioned) cannot be demonstrated until a critical mass of real-world products are at least in beta. These are beginning to emerge; similar upcoming announcements will show that enterprise storage buyers will be able to smoothly transition from FC-SCSI performance to competitive NVMe performance without having rip/replace their familiar, reliable, FC SANs. But for few more months, until more products are out, have to live with the slobber.