Newisys Introduces, Demos NVMe over Fabrics

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Sanmina’s Newisys this week unveiled the NDS22482F NVMe Fabric Storage System. This news points to the rise of NVMe over Fabrics technology in general. And that technology makes stored data a whole lot more accessible.

This platform can “deliver its full performance over Ethernet with full bandwidth and minimal added latency.” Eugene McCabe, executive vice president of Newisys, also talked about the use cases for this solution. It addresses big data analytics and warehousing, he said. And it’s aimed at enterprise online transaction processing and high performance computing applications.

Newisys says its platform is far less latency inducing than traditional approaches. It adds less than 7 microseconds to native SSD latency.

Plus it’s non blocking. It has unlimited scaling, and it can scale both horizontally and vertically. And it comes with a single or multi-node management interface.

Newisys is demonstrating the solution this week at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. It is being employed in a demo that also includes a clustered file system from IBM (News - Alert), NVMe flash drives from Intel, NVMe over Fabrics cards from Kazan, and 100Gb Ethernet switches and HBAs from Mellanox.

Cavium is another player in the NVMe over Fabrics space. Greg Scherer of Cavium said NVMe over Fabrics is part of a new storage class of memory. Scherer, who I interviewed earlier this year, is Cavium’s CTO for Ethernet and fibre channel adapters.

Today NVMe disc drives are embedded inside servers, Scherer noted. But that leaves storage on an island, he said. By that he meant no one can get to that storage if the server goes down. So the first application of NVMe over Fabric will be putting storage on the network. That, he said, will make it more accessible.

In the past, Scherer added, compute was the center of the universe in networking. Now, he said, it’s all about data. How do you get it? How do you store it? How do you retrieve it? NVMe over Fabrics addresses all that.