Toshiba Announces NVMe over Fabrics

Toshiba unveiled software technology essential to enabling deployment of NVMe-oF (NVM Express over Fabrics). This software stack deploys on storage servers, and provides critical solid state drive (SSD) abstraction, security and manageability currently lacking from existing open source implementations.

Addressing cloud data centers with diverse and demanding storage requirements, Toshiba’s software is key to fully leveraging the capacity and performance of NVM Express (NVMe) SSDs and creating more dynamic and scalable infrastructures.

NVMe-oF is a storage architecture that runs NVMe commands over a fabric transport to enable NVMe based storage to be shared across network and scaled to thousands of devices with near DAS-like performance. Seamlessly integrating with popular orchestration and provisioning frameworks, Toshiba’s software abstracts the details of physical SSDs to enable them to rapidly assign virtual namespaces of any size and performance to any compute node making NVMe-oF truly deployable in cloud data centers.

Future innovations will focus on additional enhancements to scalability, reliability, and high availability through flexible flash management and integrated security.

“Toshiba sees NVMe-oF as an important near-term storage technology that very effectively utilizes flash across the data center by disaggregating storage and enabling dynamic, diverse applications to share high performance, high capacity NVMe SSDs,” said Steve Fingerhut, senior vice president and general manager of Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. SSD business unit. “Our software technology makes NVMe-oF attached flash easily deployable in the cloud data center. We’re proud to collaborate with Mellanox and Lenovo to demonstrate this groundbreaking technology at Flash Memory Summit.”

“As the performance of both networks and SSDs grows faster, new opportunities to utilize networked storage like NVMe-oF are emerging,” said Rob Davis, Vice President of Storage Technology from Mellanox. “Toshiba’s NVMe-oF software technology enables cloud data centers to easily deploy Toshiba’s NVMe SSDs with Mellanox ConnectX Network Adapters, including ConnectX-5 and our new BlueField SOC.”