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Next Evolution for Storage Networking: Self-driving SANs

By Todd Owens, Technical Marketing Manager, Marvell

and Jacqueline Nguyen, Marvell Field Marketing Manager

Storage area network (SAN) administrators know they play a pivotal role in ensuring mission-critical workloads stay up and running. The workloads and applications that run on the infrastructure they manage are key to overall business success for the company.

Like any infrastructure, issues do arise from time to time, and the ability to identify transient links or address SAN congestion quickly and efficiently is paramount. Today, SAN administrators typically rely on proprietary tools and software from the Fibre Channel (FC) switch vendors to monitor the SAN traffic. When SAN performance issues arise, they rely on their years of experience to troubleshoot the issues.

What creates congestion in a SAN anyway?

Refresh cycles for servers and storage are typically shorter and more frequent than that of SAN infrastructure. This results in servers and storage arrays that run at different speeds being connected to the SAN. Legacy servers and storage arrays may connect to the SAN at 16GFC bandwidth while newer servers and storage are connected at 32GFC.

Fibre Channel SANs use buffer credits to manage the prioritization of the traffic flow in the SAN. When a slower device intermixes with faster devices on the SAN, there can be situations where response times to buffer credit requests slow down, causing what is called “Slow Drain” congestion. This is a well-known issue in FC SANs that can be time consuming to troubleshoot and, with newer FC-NVMe arrays, this problem can be magnified. But these days are soon coming to an end with the introduction of what we can refer to as the self-driving SAN.

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Still the One: Why Fibre Channel Will Remain the Gold Standard for Storage Connectivity

By Todd Owens, Technical Marketing Manager, Marvell

For the past two decades, Fibre Channel has been the gold standard protocol in Storage Area Networking (SAN) and has been a mainstay in the data center for mission-critical workloads, providing high-availability connectivity between servers, storage arrays and backup devices. If you’re new to this market, you may have wondered if the technology’s origin has some kind of British backstory. Actually, the spelling of “Fibre” simply reflects the fact that the protocol supports not only optical fiber but also copper cabling; though the latter is for much shorter distances.

During this same period, servers matured into multicore, high-performance machines with significant amounts of virtualization. Storage arrays have moved away from rotating disks to flash and NVMe storage devices that deliver higher performance at much lower latencies. New storage solutions based on hyperconverged infrastructure have come to market to allow applications to move out of the data center and closer to the edge of the network. Ethernet networks have gone from 10Mbps to 100Gbps and beyond. Given these changes, one would assume that Fibre Channel’s best days are in the past.

The reality is that Fibre Channel technology remains the gold standard for server to storage connectivity because it has not stood still and continues to evolve to meet the demands of today’s most advanced compute and storage environments. There are several reasons Fibre Channel is still favored over other protocols like Ethernet or InfiniBand for server to storage connectivity.

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Industry’s First NVMe Boot Device for HPE® ProLiant® and HPE Apollo Servers Delivers Simple, Secure and Reliable Boot Solution based on Innovative Technology from Marvell

By Todd Owens, Technical Marketing Manager, Marvell

Today, operating systems (OSs) like VMware recommend that OS data be kept completely separated from user data using non-network RAID storage. This is a best practice for any virtualized operating system including VMware, Microsoft Azure Stack HCI (Storage Spaces Direct) and Linux. Thanks to innovative flash memory technology from Marvell, a new secure, reliable and easy-to-use OS boot solution is now available for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) servers.

While there are 32GB micro-SD or USB boot device options available today — with VMware requiring as much as 128GB of storage for the OS and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct needing 200GB — these solutions simply don’t have the storage capacity needed. Using hardware RAID controllers and disk drives in the server bays is another option. However, this adds significant cost and complexity to a server configuration just to meet the OS requirement. The proper solution to address separating the OS from user data is the HPE NS204i-p NVME OS Boot Device.

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How to Reap the Benefits of NVMe over Fabric in 2020

By Todd Owens, Technical Marketing Manager, Marvell

As native Non-volatile Memory Express (NVMe®) share-storage arrays continue enhancing our ability to store and access more information faster across a much bigger network, customers of all sizes – enterprise, mid-market and SMBs – confront a common question: what is required to take advantage of this quantum leap forward in speed and capacity?

Of course, NVMe technology itself is not new, and is commonly found in laptops, servers and enterprise storage arrays. NVMe provides an efficient command set that is specific to memory-based storage, provides increased performance that is designed to run over PCIe 3.0 or PCIe 4.0 bus architectures, and — offering 64,000 command queues with 64,000 commands per queue — can provide much more scalability than other storage protocols.

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Navigating Product Name Changes for Marvell Ethernet Adapters at HPE

By Todd Owens, Technical Marketing Manager, Marvell

Navigating Product Name Changes for Marvell Ethernet Adapters at HPE

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) recently updated its product naming protocol for the Ethernet adapters in its HPE ProLiant and HPE Apollo servers. Its new approach is to include the ASIC model vendor’s name in the HPE adapter’s product name. This commonsense approach eliminates the need for model number decoder rings on the part of Channel Partners and the HPE Field team and provides everyone with more visibility and clarity. This change also aligns more with the approach HPE has been taking with their “Open” adapters on HPE ProLiant Gen10 Plus servers. All of this is good news for everyone in the server sales ecosystem, including the end user. The products’ core SKU numbers remain the same, too, which is also good.

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