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Tegile looking at some really flashy fabric

Ultra-fast server host attachment links are coming

Tegile, which has just launched a 2-tier IntelliFlash HD all-flash array, has plans to ramp up its capabilities dramatically.

The system provides 512TB of flash in a 3U enclosure. Tegile chief marketing officer Narayan Venkat said that the system will be at the 1PB level in a year's time, meaning a rack could hold 20PB in Tegile's configuration scheme.

Currently, IntelliFlash hooks up to accessing servers using Fibre Channel or InfiniBand. Venkat sees a need for faster access, but that does not mean InfiniBand.

Tegile will move toward having NVMe drives as phase 1 of a 2-stage move to adopt NVMe fabric (NVMeF) networking. This means that the IntelliFlash system will be linked by an external PCIe bus using NVMeF drivers to send/receive data to/from servers.

Venkat said Tegile was concentrating on adding software capabilities to its array OS so that it could better accommodate rapidly changing hardware.

It seems to us here on the El Reg storage strategy desk that NVMe fabric linking is becoming a feature of shared all-flash arrays that are poised to have a dramatically lower data access latency than Fibre Channel or 10GbitE-connected arrays.

This means that the accessing servers become more efficient and can run more VMs – many more, potentially.

Tegile, Pure Storage, and EMC's DSSD are making positive noises about NVMeF adoption. Having 20PB racks of flash at PCIe bus connect speed right next to compute will be, we think, a game-changer; think jet airplanes versus propeller-powered ones. It could be that dramatic.

It seems to us that array suppliers who do not adopt NVMeF could find themselves at a profound disadvantage selling primary storage arrays to enterprise data centers. ®

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