NVMe over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe)

NVM Express over Fibre Channel

Marvell QLogic adapters enable NVMe® over Fibre Channel

What is NVMe®?

NVM Express (NVMe®) is a new and innovative method of accessing the NVMe Storage array and has captured data centre professionals' imaginations worldwide. NVMe is an alternative to the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) standard for connecting and transferring data between a host and a peripheral target storage device or system. SCSI became a standard in 1986, when hard disk drives (HDDs) and tape were the primary storage media. NVMe is designed for use with faster media, such as solid-state drives (SSDs) and post-flash memory-based technologies. NVMe provides a streamlined register interface and command set to reduce the I/O stack's CPU overhead by directly accessing the PCIe bus. In addition, NVMe is a crucial enabler of developing technologies and applications like the internet of things, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, all of which may gain from the high performance, deep parallelism and low latency advantages offered by NVMe-attached storage. 

http://www.nvmexpress.org/

What is NVME over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe)?

Marvell QLogic adapters are enabling NVMe over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe). Workloads that demand higher throughput, IOPS, and lower latency are moving to flash. The NVMe protocol has been designed from the ground up for flash and features deep parallelism, random access, and flash access over PCI Express® (PCIe®) to maximize bandwidth. The 2870,2770 and 2690 Series Adapters support low-latency access to scale out NVMe with full support for the FC-NVMe protocol. The adapters can simultaneously support FC-NVMe and FCP-SCSI storage traffic on the same physical port, enabling customers to migrate to NVMe at their own pace.

Next-generation data intensive workloads are utilizing low-latency NVMe flash-based storage to meet ever increasing user demand. By combining the lossless, highly deterministic nature of Fibre Channel with NVMe, FC-NVMe delivers the performance, application response time, and scalability needed for next-generation data centers, while leveraging existing Fibre Channel infrastructures.