Doing what I do for a living, I have had the unique opportunity to peer under the hoods of a lot of companies across multiple industries. And whether it’s media and entertainment, sports, houses of worship or something else, the underlying theme never changes: data growth is affecting everyone.
This should come as no surprise. The sheer number of ever-expanding multi-media file types, paired with their ever-increasing sizes, have resulted in one thing only: the need for better, more integrated and smarter storage. What does this actually mean? Organizations must rethink how data is captured, preserved, accessed, and transformed.
Easy, right? Well, that depends. The crux of the solution is to embrace and invest in NVMe technology—enabling greater flexibility and faster data access, all while greatly decreasing production times. This in turn results in more cycles, more business, and more profit to the bottom line.
So the next question is: why NVMe? Here are the basics in a nutshell.
The concept of NVMe can easily be described as revolutionary—seamlessly delivering access and transport protocols to storage for both flash and the newest solid state drives (SSDs). Today, known for its ability to deliver the highest throughput and fastest response times for a wide variety of enterprise-grade media workflows, NVMe is making a significant impact on what companies can do with data.
As we are all aware, speed is of the essence in any industry. And speed is where NVMe shines. It’s high performing, easily scalable and highly optimizable—plus, it is designed to easily and seamlessly connect the host to the memory sub-system. In fact, NVMe systems deliver a massive improvement in storage performance over systems based on traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs) using legacy storage interfaces including SAS3 and SATA3. The new servers (like ours) are also more power-efficient than the traditional systems and have hot-plug capability for improved serviceability and availability.
As I’m sure you know, over the last decade, flash-based SSDs have transformed storage. They have been increasingly adopted across a wide variety of application workloads and tiers of storage due to their significant improvements—in performance, latency and power consumption—over that of traditional mechanical HDDs. While initially more expensive in comparison, the cost of flash has continued to drop, which has also contributed to the mass adoption of SSDs.
Until recently, SSDs have used SAS and SATA connectivity as their storage interface. But despite providing dramatic benefits over that of HDDs, the full potential of flash-based SSDs could not be realized. The great news is that NVMe takes flash-based SSDs to the next level by providing up to six times more throughput, up to 70% lower latency, and lower power consumption and higher reliability.
All of this then accelerates existing applications requiring high-performance workflows—and enables new applications and capabilities for real-time workflow processing in the data center and remotely.
Today’s modern businesses need revolutionary solutions to manage the growing demands and challenges associated with data storage and file sizes. NVMe, designed for high performance and non-volatile storage media, is the only protocol that can meet those demands. And, it’s also built to scale. NVMe helps avoid bottlenecks, enabling full usage of all CPU and GPU cores, and allowing for traditional scale-up applications.
Indeed, NVMe is making a huge impact in the way organizations of all types store, manage and access data more efficiently—all while improving performance, reliability and consistency.
