Lately, I have been getting deeper and deeper into low-level implementation related to storage technologies. In my previous blog, I was writing my learning adventure with Priority Flow Control (PFC) and intend to further the Data Center Bridging concepts with future blog entries.
Before I left for Sydney for a holiday last week, I got sidetracked into exciting stuff that’s happening in my daily encounters with friends and new friends. 2 significant storage related technologies fell onto my lap. One is NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory express) and the other FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array).
While this blog is going to be about NVMe, I actually found FPGA much more exciting to me. Through conversations, I found that there are 2 “biggies” in the FPGA world, and they are designed and manufactured by Xilink and Altera. I admit that I have not done my homework on FPGA yet, having just returned from Sydney last night. I will blog about FPGA in future blogs.
But NVMe is also an important technology direction to the storage world as well.
I think most of us are probably already mesmerized by solid state drives. The bombardment of marketing, presentations, advertising and whatever else the vendors do to promote (and self-promote) solid state drives are inundating the intellectual senses of consumers and enterprises alike. And yet, many vendors do not explain both the pros and cons of integrating solid states into their IT environment. Even worse, many don’t even know the strengths and weaknesses of solid states, hence creating some exaggeration that continues to create a spiral vortex of inaccuracies. Like a self-feeding frenzy, the industry seems to have placed solid state storage as the saviour of the enterprise storage world. Go figure with that!
