Top 6 Things to Look for in an All-Flash
NVMe Solution in 2020
Lenovo.com/Data Center Group
Lenovo White Paper
After a couple years of fits and starts,
it looks like all-flash NVMe is finally
ready for the breakout in enterprise
deployments that has long been
anticipated, particularly NVMe over
Fabric (NVMe-oF).
As noted by TechTarget, “storage
buyers are clearly ready to spend
precious capital on better-performing
NVMe devices rather than SSDs using
legacy storage interfaces.”1
In addition, TechTarget notes that
the ecosystem of NVMe-oF products
is evolving rapidly, making NVMeoF devices suitable for production
workloads and thus “changing the face
of data storage.”
Several recent developments are
helping to broaden that ecosystem,
including:
•
VMware announced support
for NVMe-oF as part of their
broad VMware vSphere 7
announcement. This can
mean dramatic performance
improvements for any workload
running in VMware.
•
NVMe-oF over TCP is now
available and is becoming
more widely used as another
important transport standard.
•
With the maturity of NVMe,
most Linux platforms now
include drivers, and new network
switches and interface cards
typically support NVMe-oF
as well.
Top 6 Things to Look for in an All-Flash
NVMe Solution in 2020
•
Windows operating
environments are now also
supported with special server
HBA that translate SAS to NVMe
In addition, some of the leading allflash vendors, such as Lenovo, are
offering NVMe without charging a
premium. So, with an end-to-end
solution, enterprises can get NVMe’s
dramatic performance gains at the
same cost as all-flash solutions using
SCSI protocols or SAS/SATA interfaces.
The key for enterprise storage
decision-makers is to choose a vendor
that is committed to—and capable of—
delivering the capabilities required to
turn the potential of NVMe into reality.
This means solutions that:
•
Deliver seamless end-to-end
integration among servers,
storage and networks, using
best-of-breed solutions across
the entire infrastructure.
•
Maximize NVMe performance
while still offering full-function,
enterprise-grade capabilities
such as rich snapshotting,
replication, cloud tiering,
enhanced security and data
reduction through deduplication
and compression.
•
Simplify the deployment of and
transition to NVMe.
•
Enable easy scalability, whether
scale-out or scale-up, so
storage administrators can
take an evolutionary approach
1 “NVMe-oF products are changing the face of data storage,” TechTarget, Sept. 25, 2019.
2
Lenovo White Paper
Top 6 Things to Look for in an All-Flash
NVMe Solution in 2020
to NVMe without having to rip
and replace existing storage
solutions.
•
Maximize flexibility by allowing
customers to scale capacity with
NVMe expansion to maintain
performance and investment
protection.
•
Leverage unified data
management so organizations
can take advantage of NVMe
performance on block and
file storage.
This article discusses why these six
capabilities are critical in evaluating
providers for NVMe storage and offers
guidance on choosing a provider that
can best meet the needs of mediumto-large enterprises.
No. 1. End-to-end integration
NVMe is capable of delivering dramatic
performance gains at the storage
layer, particularly in latency and IOPS.
However, in order to truly maximize
those benefits across the entire
enterprise from the core to the edge
to the cloud, organizations need an
end-to-end infrastructure that delivers
NVMe capabilities not just in storage,
but also in servers and networks.
The end-to-end model, and the
dramatic enterprise performance gains
it delivers, is a main reason NVMe-oF
usage is predicted to expand quickly,
and why this may, indeed, finally be the
year of NVMe-oF.
Organizations are finding that NVMe’s
performance benefits are not limited
to high-performance computing
use cases such as genomic research
or video rendering. When data
performance that was once the domain
of multimillion-dollar storage arrays
becomes available to the mainstream,
the range of solution possibilities
expands.
In today’s environment, with big data
analytics, exponential data growth,
hybrid cloud and the need for speed
and agility, almost every key business
app can take advantage of greater
performance—as long as other
enterprise-grade capabilities are not
sacrificed. This can include Oracle,
Microsoft SQL Server, SAP, virtual
desktop infrastructure and more.
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Lenovo White Paper
Top 6 Things to Look for in an All-Flash
NVMe Solution in 2020
Lenovo leads the industry in this new
technology as the first provider to
delivery full end-to-end NVMe support.
If you work with Lenovo as your NVMe
partner, you get: a complete end-toend NVMe-powered infrastructure from
a single vendor; best-of-breed storage,
servers and networks that work
seamlessly together; dramatic NVMe
performance gains without sacrificing
any enterprise capabilities; all serviced
and supported by a single provider.
•
IOPS: 2.1X increase in IOPs
when compared to legacy FCP
connectivity.
•
Latency: Achieve 52% lower
latency using NVMe over Fibre
Channel.
•
Throughput: Accomplish up to
2.1X throughput over traditional
SCSI FCP.2
To be successful, performance alone
is not sufficient. You need a robust
enterprise storage solution that
eliminates threats of downtime or
disruption to your business. Any
slowdowns or disruptions in the
network will impact your business.
No. 2. Maximum NVMe
performance with full
enterprise features
Here’s what you should expect in
maximum performance with NVMe-oF
in and end-to end environment:
That means your end-to-end NVMe
solution—storage to networks to
2 IOPS, latency and throughput statistics based on actual tests run by Lenovo labs.
A comparison of performance between Fibre Channel (FCP) and NVMe over FC is
shown in the following figure.
Average IOPS
(higher is better)
120000
100000
Average Latency
(lower is better)
Average Throughput
(higher is better)
0.8
400
0.7
350
0.6
300
0.5
250
0.4
200
0.3
150
0.2
100
0.1
50
80000
2.1x
60000
40000
2.1x
20000
0
IOPs
FCP
NVMe
0
Latency
FCP
NVMe
0
MB/sec
FCP
NVMe
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Lenovo White Paper
Top 6 Things to Look for in an All-Flash
NVMe Solution in 2020
servers, core to edge to cloud—
must deliver the same features and
capabilities you already demand
from your existing storage and data
management environment. This
includes:
•
Rich and immutable
snapshotting, for high availability
and huge improvements in
recovery time and recovery
point objectives.
•
Industry-leading data reduction
ratios of 3:1 or more—without
sacrificing performance.
•
Elimination of planned downtime
and minimized risk of unplanned
downtime via synchronous or
asynchronous replication.
•
Enterprise security including
encryption, real-time snapshots
and WORM-level copies to
mitigate potential ransomware
damage, as well as the ability to
secure data at rest, in flight and
in various public clouds.
to protect their installed bases,
have offered NVMe as a value-add
or a cache tier for extremely highperformance workloads. And they’ve
charged a premium.
Other important features should
include scale-out clustering; dual
active/active controller configurations
for high availability and performance;
and tiering to another layer on
premises or in the cloud to simplify
and optimize storage lifecycle
management.
A vendor with no legacy products to
protect can make it simpler, faster and
less expensive to add NVMe wherever
it is needed. Lenovo has taken the
approach that IT teams should be able
to deploy NVMe solutions quickly, with
the same processes and technologies
they are using today.
No. 3. Deployment simplicity
Most storage administrators are
looking for an evolutionary approach.
With Lenovo they are able to use
the same interface, APIs, structure
and processes as if they were simply
adding an existing array. Lenovo’s
One of the challenges in NVMe usage
is that it has often been difficult to
deploy and add into existing storage
infrastructure. Many legacy vendors,
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Lenovo White Paper
Top 6 Things to Look for in an All-Flash
NVMe Solution in 2020
No. 4. Easy scalability
Management simplicity is not just
about initial deployments and ongoing
operations; it’s also about scalability.
With the growth of hybrid cloud, edge
computing, big data analytics and
other business trends, storage and
data management needs are neither
stagnant nor predictable.
NVMe DM series includes integration
with VMware as well as easy-to-deploy
templates for applications such as
Microsoft SQL and Oracle. There are
also integrations and tools to use flash
for container storage uses cases.
Customers that have existing
ThinkSystem DM Series environments
can simply plug in an NVMe DM Series
array and it will seamlessly integrate
with the existing environment.
This saves money, time, hassle and
resources for the IT team. Lenovo
NVMe solutions require little to no
performance tuning, so systems deliver
value faster, helping accelerate speed
to production for development teams
and new workloads.
You should be able to easily and
quickly add NVMe capacity and
performance capabilities to meet the
evolving needs of customers, and
workloads. You want a solution that
lets you easily expand without a forklift
upgrade or controller proliferation. The
Lenovo ThinkSystem DM7100 enables
scale-out and scale-up flexibility, so
you can add performance and capacity
as needed. The DM7100 delivers
maximum capacity scalability with
integrated, easy scalability to cloud
providers including Microsoft Azure,
Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud.
No. 5. Investment protection
You don’t want your infrastructure
and storage teams forced to rip
and replace the SAN infrastructure
to accommodate NVMe over
Fibre Channel. Integrating with
and leveraging current and future
investments is critical.
The DM Series NVMe solution scales
out with both existing flash and hybrid
storage solutions, so customers can
design the complete infrastructure to
meet their needs. Flash is the future,
but for many workloads IT decision6
Lenovo White Paper
It’s Time for a Unified, Cloud-Enabling
Approach to Enterprise Data
Management and Storage
makers may want to leverage hybrid
DM Series arrays with flash for more
efficient backup or data archiving.
Starting now with a solution that
can scale to the next generation of
technology, IT teams can ensure that
they won’t have to deal with any
complex data migrations down the
road.
Conclusion
No. 6. Unified data management
Today’s storage and data management
environments are anything but
homogenous. With unified data
management, storage administrators
can deliver the benefits of NVMe
performance on a unified file and block
storage system. In addition, they can
support structured and unstructured
data, as well as tiering and replication
to the cloud. Business benefits of
unified data management include:
•
Reduced complexity in
managing multiple data sets
from one person.
•
Cost savings, energy efficiencies
and increased business agility by
reducing data center space.
•
Improved security and data
protection as a result of having
fewer storage devices to
manage and secure.
•
Reduced costs and management
overhead by leveraging feature
licenses for both data types.
In 2020, it is imperative to move to
future-proofed technologies such as
NVMe. The evaluation phase is over,
and organizations that invest now
will get more in return and immediate
competitive advantage.
You can leverage scale-up or scale-out
NVMe across your entire enterprise
from the core to the edge to the cloud.
You can take advantage of NVMe’s
performance across a wide range of
applications and workloads, without
sacrificing a single enterprise-grade
feature or capability.
You can work with a provider that
provides a complete end-to-end
NVMe-oF solution, including storage,
networks and servers, all with the
support and services of a single
vendor. You can simplify and unify data
management so your solution can scale
for whatever happens in the future.
You can do all of these things today,
with one caveat. You must choose the
right provider. For more information
on how your organization can best
leverage NVMe and NVMe-oF end-toend, visit Lenovo.
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