NVMe-oF RoCE with DirectFlash fabric to help enterprises unify cloud

DirectFlash Fabric enables customers to improve performance of enterprise mission critical applications as well as new web-scale applications that traditionally have relied on direct attached storage. With this announcement, Pure becomes a mainstream enterprise storage provider which widely supports NVMe-oF RoCE, which enables enterprises to get flash media closer to applications for more real-time access and greater consolidation.

Modern enterprises are challenged to deliver innovations and services that can keep up with a constantly fast-moving society, with no downtime allowed. According to Google, 53% of mobile users will leave a site that takes over three seconds to load. Applications must be available and accessible at all times. To provide a consistently amazing user experience, enterprises must cost-efficiently support widespread deployment of applications that span clouds, break free of silos and drive the benefits of an innovation platform both in the cloud and on-premises.

“The future is delivering applications and services at the speed of thought,” said Chadd Kenney, Vice President of Product and Solutions, Pure Storage. “To do this, applications can no longer live within barriers, they must interact, intercommunicate and share datasets in real-time. Architectures must converge and break down the barriers that exist today. DirectFlash Fabric is a key component for helping enterprises unify SAN, DAS, and Cloud.”

DirectFlash Fabric delivers massive optimisation between storage controllers and hosts over fast networking and makes Ethernet a first class citizen in the data centre for storage. Other solutions today may not have full enterprise features enabled, or may utilise NVMe over Fabrics with Fibre Channel rather than RDMA over converged Ethernet (RoCE), which offers the biggest potential jump in performance for Ethernet customers with a 50% latency reduction compared to iSCSI.

With the new capability, Pure is extending its DirectFlash technologies to Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) over Fabrics to enable increased efficiencies across the network, in particular with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and cloud-native, web-scale applications such as MongoDB, Cassandra and MariaDB get the benefits and efficiencies of enterprise grade shared storage.

FlashArray//X supports end-to-end NVMe on 25G and 50G Ethernet ports. Interoperability with NVMe-oF-capable NICs is available or planned from Broadcom, Cisco, Marvell and Mellanox.

Eric Burgener, Research Vice President, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC, explained: “As organisations undergo digital transformation and become more dependent on data and the ability to turn that data into compelling business insights, it is also driving a need to transform enterprise storage infrastructure to deliver better performance, availability and efficiency.

“NVMe technology will be at the core of that shift, and vendors like Pure Storage that can deliver true enterprise storage capabilities along with NVMe performance today give their customers the right infrastructure to build on for the future.”

On-Cloud, an emerging managed services provider, helps small and medium-sized businesses move applications to the cloud. After making the switch to Pure, On-Cloud dramatically improved application performance for customers, simplified management and kept costs low.

Esteban Rey, Cloud Evangelist, On-Cloud, added: “Pure’s continued investment in technologies like NVMe and NVMe-oF help us continue to innovate for our end-users. Our customers require high performance, enterprise-ready data service for all of their applications, including new cloud-native applications that we host. 

“It’s critical that our data continues to serve a more strategic purpose for our business without added headcount or headache. With Pure on the back end, our systems have never worked better and our customers have never been happier.”