Gigabyte JBOD S260-NF0 2U2N Western Digital Onyx NVMeOF Bridge ASIC 2U NVMe Over Fabric Storage
NVMe Over Fabrics (NVMeOF)
Direct Attached NVMe Storage is Fast & Efficient, but Still Has Limitations…
Direct attached NVMe storage has limited scalability, as PCIe is inherently not designed for expansion far outside the box.
Direct attached storage offers little or no support for sharing of flash resources amongst multiple servers. Servers can only access flash in their own chassis.
No sharing leads to storage utilization inefficiency and resource waste. Underutilized “stranded” or “dark” flash can be an issue
Bringing Scale-Out NVMe Storage Capabilities Independent of Compute
NVMe-OF enables NVMe-based communication over interconnects (“fabrics”) other than PCIe. This interface makes it possible to connect “external” storage enclosures to a server, either directly or through a switch, while still using NVMe as the fundamental communication mechanism. Flash storage can then be scaled out independent of compute.
Combined with virtualization, the amount and type of each resource (CPU, GPU, storage, networking) can be selected for each workload independent of where that resource is physically located in the data center.
