The third wave of storage is upon us. It represents a fundamental change in how data is stored, accessed, and used, empowering organizations to do more with their data than they ever thought possible. Riding the third wave of storage is like surfing a Maverick’s wave, where shattering expectations is the expectation, and in this case the expectation for what can be done with data.
Simply put, the third wave of storage consists of multi-controller arrays that can linearly and independently scale both capacity and performance.
Why is the third wave of storage so important to the future of IT? Simply put, it is because third wave storage can do what was impossible for first and second wave storage.
The fundamental reason why so many organizations are riding out to catch the third wave of storage is because they can now see how high performance and low latency storage that is scalable on-demand can be their organization’s expectation.
Today, the prevalent availability of NVMe-oF is reshaping what storage can do. What makes NVMe-oF the next big wave rider is that it provides the ability to use fabric attached storage, with all the advantages that it offers, while simultaneously getting the performance of DAS, without any of the overhead of software-defined solutions.
So what will it take for a majority of organizations to catch the wave that resets expectations? We believe its knowledge and experience. As more and more IT professionals see underperforming results despite solid state drives (SSDs) higher reliability and better performance than spinning disks, they will look for more insights on how to achieve more. A great site to get this type of insight is NVMeAcademy.com. As curiosity gives way to understanding, more and more IT Professionals will embrace running third wave POCs as they realize solutions that run SSDs in first wave legacy HDD technology means they are left with unmet expectations.
Enter the third wave
One of the many benefits of flash memory is that it can be accessed in parallel, which means arrays can now have multiple controllers accessing storage simultaneously. Instead of a single controller addressing a volume, hyperparallel flash arrays can leverage multiple controllers within a single system to address that same volume in parallel, for greater aggregate throughput. Additional controllers or capacity can be scaled independently and linearly.
Combine hyperparallel array performance with the ability of NVMe-oF to use RDMA/RoCE for ultra-low latency memory access over a standard ethernet network and you can see the potential for third wave technology.
During the second wave of storage, organizations had to choose between the flexibility and scalability of storage arrays that were connected over a network which came with the limitations of lower performance and higher latency and DAS in a software defined solution that offered high performance, low latency which came with high costs and significant overhead.
With the third wave of storage, Hyperparallel flash arrays, when combined with NVMe-oF, can provide the benefits of network storage, without any of the latency issues or limitations of fibre channel, along with the performance of NVMe DAS, all in an affordable solution.
Catch the wave.
Talk with an engineer.