¿Qué es el NVMe Storage?

What is NVM Express (NVMe) Storage?

NVMe (non-volatile memory express) is a transfer protocol for accessing data quickly from flash memory storage devices such as solid-state drives (SSDs) over a computer's high-speed Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) bus. Pure Storage® FlashArray//X leverages the increased transfer speeds of NVMe over PCIe to provide a performant all-flash storage array.

Why is NVMe Vital for a Modern Data Experience?

In an increasingly challenging market, big data is no longer enough to maintain a competitive edge—it must also be fast. And how do you make big data fast? You start in the server room.

Transitioning from hard-disk drives (HDDs) to SSDs is a good place to start, but it’s only one piece of the storage area network (SAN) puzzle. The transfer protocol, interconnects, and networking architecture also play important roles in the overall speed of your storage system.

That means replacing legacy technologies, such as serial attached SCSI (SAS), to NVMe/PCIe and NVMe over fabrics (NVMe-oF). There’s an inherent advantage to using a transfer protocol specifically designed for connecting SSDs to PCIe buses.

Traditional storage systems use SAS links from their controller processors to the SSDs. Because SCSI is a legacy protocol designed for disk, each connection from the CPU core to the SSD is limited by the SAS host bus adapter (HBA) and synchronized locking. This serial bottleneck holds back flash arrays that don’t take advantage of newer protocols like NVMe.

Pure Storage FlashArray//X was specifically designed to overcome this SAS bottleneck. NVMe brings massive parallelism with up to 64K queues and lockless connections that can provide each CPU core with dedicated queue access to each SSD.

NVMe Storage vs. SATA SSD

NVMe SSDs connect to the CPU of a controller via Serial ATA (SATA), which is a computer bus interface initially introduced for HDDs. Early SSDs were designed to work with SATA merely to take advantage of the ubiquity of the technology. Today, PCIe is the preferred physical interface for SSDs. The NVMe transfer protocol allows manufacturers to take advantage of SSD technology when interfacing through a PCIe. All Pure solutions leverage NVMe storage to unlock the full potential of flash memory.

NVMe Storage Benefits

NVMe storage’s main benefits include:

• Faster transfer speeds (55-180 IOPS for HDDs vs. 3K-40K IOPS with SSDs).
• Higher data throughput.
• Lockless connections that provide each CPU core with dedicated queue access to each SSD.
• Massive parallelism with over 64K queues for I/O operations.

Pure Storage leverages the increased transfer speeds of NVMe over PCIe to provide all-flash storage solutions that deliver a Modern Data Experience™.

Why Choose Pure Storage for NVMe Storage?

Designed from the bottom up to maximize the potential of NVMe storage, Pure solutions include:

• DirectFlash® Fabric: Reap the performance benefits of a SAN architected for SSD.
• Evergreen™ Storage: Non-disruptively upgrade your hardware with no downtime, no migrations, and no degradations in performance.
• Pure1®: Predictive analytics help you catch bugs and address bottlenecks before they happen.
• Purity: Purity’s AI abstracts away the complexity of managing a data center, providing you with a simple dashboard for complete control over your data.

Enterprise NVMe Solutions for File, Object, and Block Storage

Pure Storage also offers an Evergreen all-flash solution for all your block, file, and object storage needs:

• FlashArray//X: A performance-optimized all-flash array for Tier 0 and Tier 1 block storage applications
• FlashArray//C: A capacity-optimized all-flash array for Tier 2 block storage applications
• FlashBlade®: An all-flash, scale-out, network-attached storage (NAS) solution for file and object storage