It’s always exciting to join a new company with cool tech and a great team. I’m even more psyched that just two weeks into my new role, Pavilion Data Systems was announced as a finalist for 2018 Product of the Year by SearchStorage in the Enterprise Storage Arrays category.
The competition is stiff, with mostly well-known brands who have deep pockets for marketing and advertising, but the folks at SearchStorage looked beyond budgets and dug into the products with a keen eye for innovation. This is clearly the Year of NVMe and 2018 was the precursor to defining innovation, performance, ease of integration, ease of use and manageability, functionality and value.
I’m pretty deep technically and was particularly fond of the recognition that Pavilion Data “eschews the traditional two-controller design for a modular design that allows racks of storage to be customized for different types of application.” They also note that “multiple types of NVMe SSDs may be deployed in the same system, with dedicated storage for different applications.”
I’m convinced that we are starting the crest of the 2nd wave of NVMe adoption. In this wave, NVMe moves away from Direct Attached Storage (DAS) islands and into Composable/Disaggregated Infrastructure (CDI) where storage platforms are designed from the ground up to work with NVMe. Of course, traditional All-Flash Array suppliers are posturing to be relevant in the 2nd wave, but their legacy architectures with captive SSDs and retrofitted NVMe-oF™ connections impact latency and performance density. This is where Pavilion sets the new standard for data storage platforms. We start fresh with up to 20 active-active controllers and 72 NVMe SSDs of your choice interconnected across a 6Tbps switching fabric. From this foundation, we add the features you would expect from an enterprise array like a unique implementation of the Log-Structured File System, RAID-6, Thin Provisioning, Snapshots, and On-Demand Provisioning.