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Always late to the party, IBM reveals itself to be NVMe fanboy

Big Blue wants to lead NVMe transition in the industry. Really?

+Comment IBM says it's developing systems with NVMe across its storage portfolio, and wants to ignite an industry-wide leap in system performance.

Its NVMe-using products will come to the market in the first half of 2018. That's a year away. Apeiron, Excelero, E8, Micron and many others already have NVMe SSD supporting systems and are moving into NVMe over fabrics-class shared storage access.

Big Blue says its NVMe strategy is based on optimising the entire storage system stack, from apps requiring the data to flash data stores. It says some products are already using NVME-type features:

  • FlashSystem A9000 has a user-space IO paradigm, which speeds performance by allowing applications to talk "directly" to flash storage instead of navigating several operating system layers
  • Spectrum Scale offers NVMe capabilities through its local read-only cache (LROC) feature, which keeps data in reserve with very low latency access

IBM is a member of the Non-Volatile Memory Express workgroup, and is working on enabling enterprise storage systems that use the new drives, network protocols, and IO architectures.

+Comment

The adoption of NVMe drive support is for the course, but the lack of any specific mention of NVMe over fabrics is a trifle worrying. It does mention network protocols in its description of its NVMe workgroup activities and that may well mean NVMe over fabrics.

Laughably IBM's announcement states it "is leveraging its leadership in storage software to ignite an industry-wide leap in system performance". Sorry, IBM. That fire is already lit. In fact it's a blazing bonfire and you are late to the party. ®

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