According to Forbes, nearly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced each day. Given this unfathomable amount of data generated on a daily basis, many businesses are turning to more advanced solutions like Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) to efficiently and seamlessly manage their data. Purpose-built for all-flash storage systems, NVMe enables greater density and faster performance compared to legacy protocols.
SourceForge recently has the chance to speak with Zivan Ori, the co-founder and CEO at E8 Storage, a pioneer in shared NVMe storage, to discuss how this new storage access and transport protocol is changing enterprise storage. Ori also shares how E8 Storage’s first-ever shared NVMe solution delivers high performance and simplifies storage management and offers his insights into the future of the enterprise storage market.
Q: First and foremost, share with our readers a brief history of E8 Storage? How and when did the company get its start? Who are the brains behind the company?
Zivan Ori, the co-founder and CEO at E8 Storage
A: E8 Storage is the first shared NVMe storage solution in the industry, delivering high performance, low latency storage and simplified storage management – without compromising on reliability, availability or scalability. When the NVMe protocol was being developed, the founders realized that a new storage architecture was going to be needed to unlock the performance potential of NVMe media. E8 Storage was founded in November 2014, with myself as the CEO, Alex Friedman, VP R&D, and Ziv Serlin, VP Architecture.
Q: What types of industries do you serve and who are your current customers?
A: We serve a variety of industries, including financial services, healthcare, and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Recently, we worked with Queen Mary University of London, where they used our E8-D24 array, which helped underpin the university’s genomic workflow and increase performance greatly. Several of our customers are using E8 Storage, as a high-performance, fast-tier space behind GPFS to support genomics sequencing. One of our customers claimed that E8 Storage improved their genomic processing time by 100x.
The financial services industry is also a big one for us. With the massive workloads that accompany employees in the financial service industry, E8 Storage provides a solution to help manage all of that data at an incredible speed.
Q: What exactly is NVMe and how does this new protocol work?
A: Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a host controller interface and storage protocol designed specifically for solid state drives, so it leaves behind any of the legacy commands needed to manage spinning media. This streamlines the command protocol which reduces latency in the data path, a critical requirement for high-performance applications. More importantly, the NVMe protocol takes advantage of the parallelism inherent in solid state media to exponentially increase the I/O connections which improve the throughput of the SSDs.
By itself, NVMe is designed to be an internal drive for servers and PCs. In order to expand beyond the servers’ internal drive capacity, the NVMe-over-Fabric (NVMe-oF) standard was created. NVMe-oF supports the most prevalent networking fabrics (E8 Storage currently supports 100GbE and InfiniBand) and allows NVMe media to be natively accessed across the network.
Q: Why is NVMe important for today’s data-driven businesses? Can you tell us some of its benefits or advantages?
A: NVMe accelerates the performance of data-intensive applications that our customers rely on to fuel their businesses. For example, financial firms need to read and process data fast in order to make the most accurate and smart business decisions for their company — particularly if running investment or fund risk assessments, for example. Latency is a major issue for financial firms because data is only relevant for a limited time and there is a very tight window for making the right decision.
With NVMe, customers are able to not only accelerate the performance of their existing applications but with shared NVMe storage, they can dramatically increase the size of the datasets to improve their results. Through this, financial firms are able to increase the time period of trend analysis; secondary analysis of genome sequencing can be performed across a much larger population; and deep learning algorithms can increase the training sets used for artificial intelligence applications.
In short, when NVMe is introduced, businesses are able to improve their data analytics and make better business decisions.
Q: As a pioneer in shared NVME storage, what is your advice for enterprises that have yet to move to NVMe solutions in managing their data?
A: The generation of data is showing no signs of slowing down. As the pace of business speeds up, so do the demands on the applications that drive business revenue. The most demanding applications, such as financial trading, genomics, and artificial intelligence directly fuel the revenue stream of the company, and any bottleneck to performance has a direct impact on the bottom line. High performance compute clusters need all the compute resources available to drive the applications and require high-performance storage to ensure fast access to data.
If businesses are looking to increase performance and density for their storage architectures to keep up with the modern data acquisition, the switch to NVMe is the next logical step for them.
Q: Tell us more about E8 Storage’s first-ever centralized NVMe solution for enterprise storage. What are its core features and capabilities?
A: E8 Storage was launched in 2014 and brought to market the storage industry’s first-ever shared storage appliance designed for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) drives. The E8-D24 is the flagship appliance with proven performance of up to 10M IOPS and 40GB/s throughput at latency as low as 100µs. Supporting up to 273TB usable capacity in a compact 24 drive 2U form factor, the E8-D24 delivers superb performance, availability, and reliability.
E8 Storage software supports multiple deployment options and scales out to support more than a hundred connected hosts. One of the key features (and a first for shared NVMe storage) is support for shared read and write NVMe volumes, enabling distributed file systems such as IBM Spectrum Scale to leverage E8 Storage as a high-performance scratch space tier for HPC workloads.
Q: How does E8 Storage’s E8-D24 deliver a far more cost-effective solution than existing storage products available in the market? Can you provide us with sample use cases?
A: E8 Storage’s E8-D24 is based on open hardware architecture and uses off-the-shelf NVMe drives and Ethernet NICs to deliver a far more cost-effective solution than existing storage products. In other words, it provides 10 times the performance of other all-flash arrays and features fast random-access latency that can guarantee consistent application availability and overall response times without any need for caching.
One of our most common use cases is with artificial intelligence and deep learning. Artificial intelligence (AI), fueled by deep learning (DL), is completely transforming the computing landscape across a broad spectrum of industries that leverage image recognition technology to fuel their needs, including financial technology, healthcare, manufacturing and law enforcement. With this, shared storage performance would be on par with local NVMe SSD and would be easily integrated into existing high-performance GPU server clusters.
Q: What are some of the top trends in enterprise data storage that are worth tracking and are bound to shape the future of the industry? How is E8 Storage meeting these?
A: One trend that is worth tracking and will continue to evolve in the future is autonomous vehicles. Since our headquarters are located in the heart of Silicon Valley, which is #1 for autonomous vehicle research and development, the streets are constantly filled with self-driving cars and vans. It appears that customers specifically in this vertical are unanimously expressing a need for very fast storage, in order to accelerate the applications and data that drive autonomous vehicle development. Once automated vehicles will be the “norm,” technology will evolve around it and so will E8 Storage’s approach.
About E8 Storage
E8 Storage is a pioneer in shared NVMe storage for data-intensive, high-performance applications. Established in 2014, E8 Storage’s scalable, reliable and affordable solution delivers unparalleled storage performance while cutting costs and using only off-the-shelf hardware. E8 Storage specializes in NVMe, NVMe-oF, shared storage, flash, disaggregated flash, data storage, RDMA and more.