Together with Dell EMC, Cisco and SANBlaze, Virtual Instruments announced that the highly advanced non-volatile memory express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage protocol is now ready for the enterprise.

NVMe is considered one of the most disruptive innovations in the storage industry since flash storage, as it promises to reduce latency and increase performance far beyond existing SAS-based flash systems. NVMe-oF extends that performance boost over current storage infrastructures. However, until now, NVMe-oF faced challenges to widespread adoption in the enterprise sector with limited product availability and uncertainty with respect to the actual benefits. Enterprise IT leaders have been facing challenging decisions, including which workloads will benefit the most, how to select the right products, and how to mitigate risk during migration due to the limited supporting ecosystem.

At Dell Technologies World, Virtual Instruments, Dell EMC, Cisco and SANBlaze will demonstrate how the four companies have collaborated to eliminate these challenges to make NVMe-oF enterprise-ready. The demo will simulate an NVMe-based, workload-heavy enterprise environment, which will consist of the following technologies:

- Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom infrastructure monitoring and AIOps platform
- Virtual Instruments’ WorkloadWisdom storage performance validation platform
- Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe Data Storage
- Cisco MDS 9100 Series 32Gb Multilayer Fabric Switches
- Cisco SAN Analytics and SAN Telemetry Streaming
- SANBlaze VirtuaLUN Storage Emulation

The environment will feature Cisco’s MDS switches, which are sold and serviced by Dell EMC under the Connectrix MDS brand, connected to Dell EMC PowerMax arrays, with the massive simulated load generated by the combination of Virtual Instruments’ WorkloadWisdom storage workload modeling and analytics, integrated with the SANBlaze VirtuaLUN load generator. The entire environment will be monitored from end-to-end by Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom, which will showcase new agentless integrations to Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming (NVMe-oF), and Dell EMC NVMe-oF PowerMax that collect, monitor, correlate and analyze from the application servers, to the PowerMax. Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming provides on-switch, in-band monitoring of NVMe-oF I/O storage traffic.

By showcasing superior NVMe-oF performance for the enterprise in a fully tested and monitored environment, the expansive demo will illustrate how the integrated ecosystem of Virtual Instruments, Dell EMC, Cisco and SANBlaze is making NVMe-oF viable for enterprise data centers. For example, the latest Cisco 32Gb MDS switches support both Fibre Channel and NVMe running in the same chassis, along with SAN Telemetry Streaming (STS), enabling IT leaders to reduce the risk of migration to NVMe-based storage such as the latest Dell EMC PowerMax arrays. As a result, the four companies are poised to help accelerate the adoption of NVMe in the enterprise for high-performance mission-critical applications.