Re-architecting storage infrastructure

What’s in a name? In NVMe-OF’s case, quite a lot. What’s that, you say, apart from being a front-runner for technology’s worst acronym awards? Data centre transformation, is that better? No, of course it isn’t and with good reason. Infrastructure vendors have been telling us how important it is to refresh our data centre infrastructures for some time, as otherwise you won’t be able to reap the rewards of, you know the sort of thing, massively scalable analytics workloads, application consolidation, more dynamic infrastructure, greater business value and so on. Trouble is, for a wealth of reasons, few enterprises have the luxury of rip-and-replace transformation. And while processing and storage have moved forward at the speed of Moore’s Law, the pesky network has continued to slow everything else down. So, here’s the good news. The NVMe-OF protocol has emerged from the direct attached storage world as a way of connecting solid-state storage to processing at, well, the speed of light (OF stands for Over Fabric), essentially removing the bottleneck of data transfers.