Get to know NVMe and how it meets the demands of ever-increasing Storage Needs

By John Reardon, Editor

Introduced in 2012, the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) quickly replaced the older SATA Solid State Drive (SSD) for storage solutions. The increased performance for high bandwidth data and lower latency better supported the current generation of NAND flash memory. Running on PCIe serial bus data rates increased to 3 Giga Bytes per second with seek times significantly faster.

The approach of NAND flash acceleration via the PCIe interface used in NVMe protocol is not the first industry attempt to benefit from PCIe transfer speeds in data storage devices. But what made NVMe so successful is a direct connection between the NAND controller and host processor without unnecessary data protocol translations. NVMe is built upon x4 gen3 (8 Gb/s) PCIe lanes connection, which results in 32 Gb/s of theoretical maximum data transfer rate.

The use of NVMe will invariably increase the performance of a system over previous technologies. But not all sources are created equal. For example, the Toshiba RC100 reads at 1.2 GBps and writes at just less than 900 MBps, while Samsung’s 970 Pro exceeds the 3GBps and writes at over 2.5GBps. Speeds variations can also occur with improper configuration and or insufficient cache.

OSS - Provide up to 200TB high-density PCIe NVMe flash and support up to 8 million IOPS with 80GB/second throughput. Many of our Storage Arrays are based on the Ion Accelerator Software.

Navy Lt. Aaron Van Driessche, warfare tactics instructor at the Center for Surface Combat Systems Detachment San Diego, pilots the Navy’s virtual combat curriculum inside a newly launched portable simulator in San Diego.

The excitement of NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMeoF™) will quickly cause it to be adopted by data centers on a broad scale. The iniquitous nature of TCP has driven this surge and will result in a wide adoption throughout those military applications that require both speed and flexibility. This any-to-any connection of elements will play well within the heterogeneous world of defense far beyond storage alone.

Computational storage, sometimes referred to as “in-situ” or “in-storage” processing, the ability to off-load the primary CPU from the overhead of interfacing with the storage layer will remove the delays in response time and queries. Computational storage will play a key role in inference computer where CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks) and other AI data structures are better dealt with on a local level.

The use of Computational Storage reduces overhead on resources and at the same time affords the system higher throughput for applications that require a determinative compute needs and lower latencies. As data structures and size continues to push the PCIe bus for faster and faster transfers, this miss-match will

Phoenix - 3U VPX SSD storage module delivers extremely high performance through a single Fat Pipe of PCIe x4. Designed from the ground up to remove legacy layers of SATA and SAS hard drive interfaces, it takes full advantage of the speed and parallelism of solid-state nonvolatile memory.

continue to drive Computational Storage even as PCIe Gen 5 and 6 are released.

The National Institute of Standards or NIST created the standard to address the levels of cryptology that a storage module must meet. Four security levels within the FIPS 140-2 standard address an increasingly stringent requirement. To achieve compliance a vendor must be tested by one of thirteen labs certified at great expense and time. The ability for a module to achieve the highest levels of security is so difficult that it is very seldom achieved. Rumors about FIPS 140-3 have been circulating at recent trade events, but as it has been delayed on three prior occasions dating back to 2013, it is

U.S. Navy Minemen 2nd Class Matthew Rishovd (left) and Kody Egelhoff, repair a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration buoy in the Atlantic. The sailors are fixing the buoys to collect weather data that could help predict hurricanes.

believed that many of the requirements have already been baked into 140-2.

FPGA’s have shown significant performance increases in the data center and cloud-based applications where NVMe plays a significant role. FPGAs because of their ability to handle the parallel processing, their speed, and programmability, plus the fact the some features ARM processor cores, like the Xilinx MPSoC. This allows computational storage through the off-loading of the primary CPU.

Aldec, Inc., has launched a powerful, versatile and timesaving FPGA-based NVMe Data Storage solution to aid in the development of High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications such as AI and Machine Learning. The solution includes an Aldec TySOM embedded prototyping board, up to eight high-bandwidth, low-latency FMC-NVMe daughter cards, and a reference design (including source files and binaries) allowing engineers to fast-track their projects.

The IntelliProp NVMe Host Accelerator IP Core provides a small footprint processor register interface or RTL state-machine register interface for data movement between a user-defined data buffer and an NVMe target. Additionally, the NVMe Host Accelerator IP Core requires minimal knowledge of the PCIe and NVMe specification. The IP Core handles initialization of the PCIe Root Complex, building command submissions, parsing command completions.

One of the more interesting solutions being offered is by Phoenix International, VP1-25-eSSDC. This conduction-cooled solution takes ad

Vanguard Rugged - This 3U conduction cooled VPX module is an example of one of the many storage solutions that is offered by Vanguard. The company is has indicated that a fabric variant of this and other solutions will be available in Q4 2020. U.S. Air Force Capt. Douglas Gautrau, a WC-130J Hercules aircraft flight meteorologist adjusts his instrument panel before a mission to collect data from Hurricane Igor on the island of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands.

vantage of the VPX open standard from VITA, with a FIPS 140-2 compliant, 3U, 15 TB module. Delivered with out-of-box software drivers, Phoenix has addressed the expanding VPX market with a solution that will address the mandated use of the VPX form factor in many military applications.

SuperMicro continues to push both price and performance with its release of series high-density NVMe systems. These 1U and 2U systems have several configurations supported by a Dual Intel XEON based Motherboard. This allows for more than 3TB of storage with features such as hot-swap and redundant power supplies. The breadth and width of this product line afford the end-user the ability to purchase no more than is needed to address their specific application.

Aldec - TySOM is a family of development boards for embedded applications that features Xilinx ® Zynq™ all programmable module combining FPGA with ARM ® Cortex processor. Plethora of included peripherals makes these boards useful in various embedded military applications.

ronments, the One Stop System’s FSAn-4R (Ruggedized) NVMe All-Flash Array provides a new level of performance for applications such as real-time HPC, high-speed data recording, analytics, and big data. The storage system is used for acceleration of mission-critical, high-performance databases, Hadoop clusters and HPC applications with large data sets. The FSAn-4R was designed for harsh environments such as broadcast trucks, ground stations, and surveillance aircraft.

Founded on building rugged storage modules that address a variety of applications, Vanguard Rugged out of Colorado, has an expertise worth mentioning. The company has an array of solutions that address open standards commonly used in military applications. Whether you are looking for a VME solution for an existing application or Just a Box of Disk (JBOD), Vanguard is a focused solution provider that can address difficult applications.

NVMe is a technology that is at the right place at the right time. As silicon manufactures embed PCIe into their solutions; the demands for bigger data sets become the norm and as the topology based on high speed interconnects become more complex storing and caching data will be on the rise.

The price has stabilized in recent months at just 20 cents per Gigabyte – 10 to 15 times greater in cost than HDD. Yet by having a transfer time of 3 Gigabytes per second verses HDD at 200 Megabytes and SATA at 550 Megabytes per second, the performance makes it perfectly suited for most applications. This is combined with the inherently rugged nature of the SSD’s themselves – gives NVMe a clear playing field for the foreseeable future.