Mapping Technology Trends to Enterprise Product Innovation

Scope: Focusses on enterprise platform software: Big Data, Cloud platforms, software-defined, micro-services, DevOps.
Why: We are living in an era of continuous change, and a low barrier to entry. Net result: Lot of noise!
What: Sharing my expertise gained over nearly two decades in the skill of extracting the signal from the noise! More precisely, identifying shifts in ground realities before they become cited trends and pain-points.
How: NOT based on reading tea leaves! Instead synthesizing technical and business understanding of the domain at 500 ft. 5000 ft., and 50K ft.

(Disclaimer: Personal views not representing my employer)

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Accessing Flash-based Storage: Thinking beyond SCSI

There are two popular form factors to connect a Solid State Device to a  host server: a traditional disk form factor ( SAS or SATA), and  a  PCIe card.  For  PCIe connected Flash storage, the industry is divided into two camps on the topic of driver protocols:
1. Defining a new block access protocol that is light-weight and best suited for the performance characteristics of the Flash device.  as a traditional SCSI device. NVM Express is a specialized block storage protocol for Solid State Devices. In comparison with SCSI, NVMe has a reduced instruction set. The specification can support up to 64,000 I/O queues with up to 64,000 commands per queue. With multiple cores, each processor core can implement its own queue. Also, the protocol has interesting features some for T10 DIF/DIX
2. Extending the SCSI protocol to standardize the SCSI protocol across a PCIe physical interface. The objective is to have a wider range of existing SCSI devices that can potentially be PCIe connected. SCSI over PCIe (SOP) can support two queueing interfaces: NVMe and PQI (PCIe Queuing Interface).

 Its interesting to watch how this space evolves!

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