Enterprise Explained: Should I Make the Switch to NVMe?

Опубликовано 14 апреля 2021, 17:00

For the last 5 years server and hardware configurations have been pretty much the same. Even with the rise of edge computing, most edge networks mirror existing hardware configurations using SATA or SAS SSDs. Only in rare instances, have we seen dramatic changes in hardware configurations. When we do, redundancy and uptime are key. That’s why many data centers are switching to enterprise-grade NVME SSDs.

If more data centers are moving to NVMe, should I upgrade my servers?

Upgrading a simple 1U server or 10U rack is limited by the availability of connections. Most systems that are SATA or SAS SSDs connect to one another using hardware-based RAID controllers. But NVMe uses the PCI-Express ports for faster transfer speeds, it leverages software-defined RAID profiles.

When making the switch to NVMe your hardware platforms will have to change. Since it’s not connecting via hard drive interfaces of SATA and SAS it’s now connecting to NVMe so it's a completely different data path structure. It’s now likely that a system is managing the storage with software instead of hardware-based controllers. Much consideration is required to make the switch to NVMe. Tier one cloud providers are very nimble best positioned to make that type of a change within their organizations. They've been enjoying the performance benefits of NVMe for many years.

Simply put, if it’s working and providing the amount of performance needed for today’s operations, is there a need to switch?

Is there changes to your redundancy practices? If so, here are some things to consider. Switching to software-defined redundancy practices can present a barrier to moving forward. Certain apps may require changes down to the kernel level and managing multiple apps across a network could result in a lot of rewrites. Plus, not all software-defined storage platforms will support traditional RAID profiles such as RAID 5, 6 or 10.

What are the existing pain points to your architecture and will NVMe solve for it? Some issues may not be a data transfer issue, but really a read/write profile or simply not using enterprise-grade drives. Many drives today have high-performance specs on their data sheets but don’t address long-term consistency or predictability of performance.

So, it's important for companies to not only look at data sheet and website specs but to use an SSD in an application and evaluate its performance. Companies should be looking at the SSD’s I/O consistency and latency delivery.

What prevents you from switching to NVMe now? Because SATA and SAS and NVMe hardware is at price parity now, the big thing companies need to look out for is how they're going to manage these devices moving forward. They're no longer going to be connecting drives to hardware-based controllers. They're going to be connecting them to software to manage these devices. Companies need to go out and look for software-defined storage platforms for things like redundancy practices data replication and data backup.

Are you replacing or supplementing your existing storage? When you have specific SLAs there's a real need to switch to deliver consistent performance. But, for SAS providers that deliver tiered application support it might be with it to create entirely new systems that are based on NVMe. Generally, workloads haven't changed but even with new customers, services can be tiered by high performance and availability. For the content driven data center you can now host services and apps you couldn't in the past but are now made possible with NVMe deployments.

If you're a cloud provider or a hosting company your storage performance is critical for your ability to deliver on your SLAs. In terms of form factor in the data center U.2 has taken the lead in popularity. Today tier one server OEMs and white box system manufacturers are offering a broad range of high bay count NVMe servers.

Am I chasing a trend or have customers driven demand? It's always nice to have the new and shiny upgrades to our servers. It could be a competitive advantage. But chasing a trend could just open more doors if you're not ready. Form factor is going to be a big hindrance until new servers are available. We're seeing a lot of interest in being able to replace an NVMe drive in a front-loading server. Regardless of the answers to these questions Kingston continues to provide the most consistent enterprise-grade NVMe and SATA SSDs to support the needs of data centers. Whatever your SSD needs are, Kingston Is With You.