Let’s unpack the details, pros, cons, and other common questions about NVMe-oF. 

What is NVMe?

NVM (non-volatile memory) is a type of memory that holds on to its content when the power fails. NVMe is the function that stores the data and allows you to access it. NVMe is the interface for SSDs. Essentially, NVMe is a type of NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access) that is optimized, scalable, and feature-rich for use with a broad range of enterprise and client systems. NVMe has the ability to support up to 64K commands per queue, while requiring only 13 commands to deliver optimal performance. 

Read more: Networking 101: What is NVMe?

What is NVMe over Fabric? 

NVMe over Fabrics is also referred to as NVMe-oF and non-volatile memory express over fabrics. It is a relatively new protocol specification designed to connect hosts to storage across a network fabric using the NVMe. NVME-oF supports a range of storage networking options including interface into storage systems, scaling to accommodate large quantities NVMe devices, and extending the distance within a data center so that more spread out subsystems can be accessed.

Pre-NVMe data storage could be broken down into three options:

1. iSCSI: iSCSI is an internet-based storage networking standard for transferring small computer systems interface, aka SCCI, using standard Ethernet cables. Operation speeds are in the ballpark of 1GB/s, although 10GB/s or more can be possible with high bandwidth Ethernet cards.
2. Serial attached SCSI (SAS): SAS is a point-to-point serial protocol for transferring data using SAS cables. This option allows you to connect up to 128 drives via host bus adapters with speeds ranging from 3GB/s, 6GB/s,12GB/s to 22.5GB/s.
3. Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP): FCP is a protocol that uses fiber optic (or copper) cables to transport commands. In this instance, fabrics behave as one big switch, avoiding electromagnetic interference (EMI) issues and offering up other network technologies speeds typically from 1 to 128GB/s.

NVMe-oF is the future of data storage when it comes to performance and bottlenecks. Enter NVMe. The next logical step is to add lossless high-speed data transfer capabilities of FC to NVMe. Welcome NVMe-oF — the evolution of the all-flash array. 

Also read: How Data Centers Must Evolve in the Cloud First Era

Benefits of NVME-oF

The benefits of NVMe-oF include power, performance, ability to scale, and ease of use to your network. NVMe-oF offers: 

• Low latency over your network
• Ability for parallel requests
• Increased and optimized performance, including storage array performance
• Reduction of the length of the OS storage stacks on the server side
• Faster end solution with a move from Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS)/Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives to NVMe SSDs
• High speed
• Ability to scale out thousands of other devices;
• Multipath support of the fabric enables multiple, simultaneous paths between the NVMe host initiator and storage system
• Ability to send and receive commands from many hosts and storage subsystems at one time. 

Drawbacks of NVMe-oF 

There are a few drawbacks and challenges of using NVMe-oF, including: 

• Beware the imposter. Although they may work, there are systems that use a proprietary native protocol for your unique solution. It may be the option that works for you, but it’s just good to be aware that it is not NVMe-oF.
• NVMe-oFis relatively new. Because it’s fairly fresh to the market, many NVMe-oF integrations could be potentially incompatible. 
• NVMe-oF may be an issue with newer technologies. It is basically a faster, more effective iSCSI that has copied outdated architecture and concepts from 40 years ago. This makes it less compatible with current technologies and concepts such as fully automated API control, software defined storage (SDS), hyper-converged infrastructure, and distributed storage (DS).
• No support for end-to-end data integrity can create an issue. End-to-end data integrity checking is important when considering the large volume of data that these systems are expected to process at lightning fast speeds. 

The NVMe-oF Future is Now

NVMe-oF allows for deeper consolidation in the data center, making way for faster network speed and broader bandwidth. It also eliminates silos and allows you  to leverage a single, efficient shared storage infrastructure. 

NVMe-oF also reaches out externally to find more efficient ways to retrieve data and avoid bottlenecks, justifying the current buzz about its place in data management.

Read next: Steps to Building a Zero Trust Network

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Businesses continue to navigate their data-driven environments, that’s no secret. And data growth will undoubtedly continue. Add to that mix the fact that today’s users expect instantaneous response, despite the fact that the app must become more complex and as the applications themselves become vastly more complex and resource dependent. In this evolving landscape, businesses have to continually evolve with the demands, focusing on how data is captured, preserved, accessed, and protected.

Let’s unpack what NVMe is and how it can support your data-centric organization.

What is NVMe?

NVM is a type of memory that holds on to its content when the power fails. NVMe is the function that stores the data and allows you to access it. NVMe is the interface for SSDs. Essentially, NVMe is a type of NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access) that is optimized, scalable, and feature-rich for use with a broad range of enterprise and client systems. NVMe has the ability to support up to 64K commands per queue, while requiring only 13 commands to deliver optimal performance.

 Also read: How Data Centers Must Evolve in the Cloud First Era

How Did NVMe Develop?

NVMe was the first protocol that truly met the need for high-speed storage media. The original tools, such as flash-based SSDs tapped into SATA/SAS physical interfaces, protocols, and form factors, which reduced the needs for changes in the existing enterprise storage systems. However, they lacked the speed that is a non-negotiable requirement in today’s network environments.

Storage technology has leapfrogged drastically over the past ten years. Before the development of SSDs, hard drives were the only storage type accessible. A wide range of limitations came with that option — most limiting was speed and efficiency. When SSDs arrived on the scene, they changed the game for storage media, offering their powerful speed and convenient form factor. NVMe has taken those elements a step further to offer an optimized resource with both power and speed.

Also read: Hyperconverged Infrastructure is Reshaping IT Management

How Does NVMe Work?

NVMe is the communication conductor between the storage interface and the System CPU. It uses high-speed PCIe sockets, independent of the storage form factor. Because of its independence, tasks performed using NVMe drivers are faster, do more work and complete the task faster than older storage models using older drivers, such as AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) a feature of SATA SSDs. NVMe was designed specifically for SSDs making it the new industry standard for both servers in the enterprise data center and in client devices. The reason NVMe storage is so popular is because it saves time. Unlike its predecessors, NVMe leverages today’s multicore CPUs and gigabytes of memory (in addition to solid-state storage). NVMe storage also optimized more powerful and streamlined command sets to efficiently bring data to its source.

Also read: Network 101: 5 Essential Wireless Protocols 

What are NVMe’s Benefits and Drawbacks?

The benefit of NVMe is its ability to capitalize on parallel data paths to the underlying media, offering better performance in terms of acceleration. It makes existing applications and enables new applications to work more efficiently. Wasted compute cycles eat into the budgets of business that require more to support a sluggish IT infrastructure in terms of storage and power. NVMe can optimize the application workloads with a smaller infrastructure footprint, offering the organization a reduced cost and accelerated functionality.

Benefits of NVMe include:

• Higher performance through write amplification reduction
• Higher capacities by lower over-provisioning
• Lower costs due to reduced SSD controller DRAM footprint
• Improved latencies

While NVMe offers a bevy of benefits, there are some mistakes to avoid, such as:

• NVMe is a communication interface and storage protocol, and should not be treated as a storage media device.
• Price is not the best or only way to choose your NVMe SSD. Performance requirements of application workloads feature as the main criteria used in the determination.

Enterprise systems in today’s environment are data hungry. The demands for better, faster, and more complex data will continue to tax networks and applications. Even high-performance SSDs struggle to perform with legacy storage protocols is this challenging environment. NVMe offers the power, connectivity, and efficiency needed to slay bottlenecks for a myriad of computing environments. Designed for high performance and non-volatile storage media, NVMe is the protocol that rises to the forefront in today’s demanding enterprise, cloud and edge data ecosystems.

Read next: Simplifying Data Management with Hybrid Networks

The post Networking 101: What is NVMe? appeared first on Enterprise Networking Planet.

The data fabric market size was valued at $812.6 million in 2018, but is projected to reach $4,546.9 million by 2026, according to a report by Allied Market Research. This represents a growth of 23.8% from 2019 to 2026.

“With the rise in need for business agility and data accessibility,” Allied Market Research notes, “there is an increase in adoption of data fabric platforms as it enables applications and tools to access data using a wide range of interfaces that a business has deployed.”

What is Data Fabric?

Data fabric is a data management resource. It can be defined as a set of data services that provide consistent capabilities across a choice of endpoints. Data fabric reaches from on-premise environments to cloud-based landscapes with the objective to simplify, integrate, and accelerate. Data fabrics weave together cross-functional data connections. This connection creates efficiencies, operational fluidity, and network stability that can result in competitive advantages for the enterprise.

Here’s an example as it relates to a traditional supply chain data system. Without data fabric architecture in place, the supply chain operates much like a relay, handing off from one silo to the next down the line. When one part of the chain fails, the entire system can be brought to its knees. When a complex network of actors is in sync and able to adjust as needed, it ebbs and flows through the process without breakage or stoppage.

 Also read: Transforming Networks: From Virtualization to Cloudification

The Data Fabric Backstory

Today the mandate for enterprise IT is to deliver measurable business value with little exception. With the popularity of IoT, increase in the volume of unstructured data, growing presence of external data sources, and a trend toward hybrid multi-cloud environments, every data request has hoops to jump through. At the same time, data strategies, in this post-big data landscape, must be agile to succeed.

The competing problem is that enterprises are mired in data strategies that can’t pivot when an external factor requires them to do so. Structured data management systems excel in environments that are just that — structured. The problem is the world is growing less and less structured, and businesses need that fluid movement to remain competitive and viable. Enterprise data fabrics offer a better solution. By weaving together data from internal silos and external sources, data fabric creates a network of information to power business applications, data analytics, and artificial intelligence.

Also read: Simplifying Data Management with Hybrid Networks

The Benefits and Challenges of Enterprise Data Fabrics

Like any solution, data fabrics offer a list of benefits and challenges for enterprise networks. Let’s examine a few of them.

The benefits of data fabrics:

• Adaptability – Data fabrics can answer questions that weren’t anticipated and morph to accommodate new requirements.
• Insight – Data is useless when it can’t be connected and assigned meaning. Data fabrics help you accomplish this task.
• Ease of Query – Data fabrics enable the business to query across all its data silos (both internal and external sources) and regardless of data structure.
• Seamlessness – Data fabrics enable you to modernize your existing systems. You won’t have to replace what you have to use this tool.

The challenges of data fabrics:

• Performance – Data fabrics must be capable of scaling both in and out, to support your requirements.
  
• Accessibility – Data fabrics have to support all your unique data sources to be a viable solution.
  

Data Fabric in an Enterprise Network Architecture

Data fabric becomes a key piece of the enterprise networking architecture by providing organizations with the means to better deal with overwhelming volumes of data as well as the ongoing evolution of business applications and network processing requirements. Data fabric becomes a connector of sorts that brings in data from all your sources, in all your unique structures. It uses your existing network tools and allows you to tap into data from one centralized, non-siloed place. In a world where agility is no longer optional and real data insights are the key to achieving goals, data fabric may be a necessity to get you there.

Read next: Why 5G Isn’t Just For Carriers

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Get to Know UTM

So, what is a unified threat management system? It can come in the form of an A unified network hardware appliance, a virtual appliance, or a cloud service. Its sole purpose is to protect the business from security threats through simplifying, streamlining, and integrating its multiple security services and features.

Businesses in 2021 are facing myriad threats from malware to ID theft to ransomware to full-court network attacks. UTM can provide a central control center from which security can be monitored. It has become an increasingly popular tool for businesses who want to shave costs of onsite network security while understanding the increased need for visibility and centralized responsiveness.

Unified threat management products are dedicated security systems that:

• Perform security functions such as firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, antivirus, virtual private networking, etc.
• Provide layered, integrated cybersecurity protection from one centralized appliance.
• Require less administration typically at a lower cost.

 Also read: Simplifying Data Management with Hybrid Networks

Understanding the Architecture of UTM

UTM has been on the radar of the enterprise level IT decision makers for some time because this type of system was (in the past) primarily used for hardware consolidation while also being easy to use and cost effective. As the unified threat management marketplace evolved, the top UTM vendors pushed out appliances that are truly ready to address the enterprise’s needs with features such as virtual local area network (VLAN) capabilities that can support a variety of security zones as well as offer load balancing and ease of scalability.

Making the leap to a UTM system can take a level of commitment and effort for IT pros, who might be resistant to replacing standalone units that are performing well, shifting to one point of security control. The time to adopt a UTM approach may be right when a large organization has a need to consolidate its firewalls on a large network, such as when going through a merger or acquisition.

Also read: The Ultimate Guide To Server Management Software

Unpacking the Benefits and Challenges of UTM

Like any system, the UTM offers pros and cons that must be weighed in relation to your business’s needs. Some are universal and can be aligned with nearly all security objectives, however. Here is a list of UTM’s benefits and challenges:

Benefits

• Simplifies your network. At the heart of the reason for going with UTM is simplification. The consolidation of multiple security appliances reduces time, breaks down silos, lowers learning curves for new staff and reduces cost/space/energy requirements.
• Increases security and visibility. Having a view from the top is one of the most attractive attributes of the UTM system. Your centralized system will offer reporting tools, application filtering and virtual private network (VPN) capabilities — all designed to help you defend your network from the always-looming cyberthreat. The UTM approach allows you to take on security from a more proactive and efficient stance.
• Elevates your defense. The unified threat maintenance system, as the name implies, offers a unified layer of security to prevent attacks. By defending multiple points from one central location, you are better poised to defend against today’s increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks.

Challenges

• All eggs in one basket. With one singular point of contact, your organization can be impacted if all services fail. Most enterprises utilizing a UTM system secure a standby that can be activated should a system failure occur.

• Impact on performance. UTM has a lot of work to do managing all your systems, which can cause it to impact your network performance, especially during periods of heavy load. This can be addressed, but it is important to get the right size UTM appliance for your needs.

Also read: Utilizing Private Cellular Networks for Enterprise Connectivity

How UTM Evolves

Cyberthreats continue to place a demand on IT decision makers. Tapping into technology that takes an all-encompassing approach to protection and prevention is key to surviving. Your UTM system’s security layers will certainly include a firewall, antivirus and intrusion detection, as well as ways to ensure you are protecting yourself through prevention analysis tools. You may also take advantage of additional security services that evolve with new and heightened levels of threats, such as:

• Data. Data loss is one of the top cyberthreats businesses are facing today. UTM can offer prevention software to reduce this threat by preventing data leaks from occurring.

• Real-time monitoring. Cyberthreats change and evolve over time, growing more and more sophisticated. Through real-time analysis, your UTM system can help you identify weaknesses and address them before an attack or threat takes place.

• Network operations. UTM can also regulate your network’s bandwidth by helping to prioritize network traffic and keeping your system from getting overly taxed.

• Email filtering. Another helpful security tool UTM offers is filtering of spam, virus, or phishing-related emails. This lowers your chance of these types of common breaches.

• Web filtering. Web filtering is another key layer of security needed to prevent dangerous or inappropriate sites infecting your network through malvertising or malicious code. The filter tool can also help with restricting sites such as social media, gaming sites, pronography, etc.

• App filtering. UTM puts the power of application filtering in your control by allowing you to blacklist or whitelist programs to protect your network security and its performance.

Unified threat monitoring is a viable option for creating a control center that protects your organization from threat. While there are rarely one-size-fits-all options, it is essential that you weigh out the nuances, costs, and commitment needed to switch to a UTM system. A key part of that analysis will include understanding what your current risk exposure is as well as what the impact a successful cyberattack could have on your business. 

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