Huawei Connect: Lossless Ethernet-Based NVMe-oF Inevitable Choice in All-Flash Storage Era

At Huawei Connect 2021, experts from IDC, Tolly, Bank of China, and Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. congregated to discuss the future of storage networks.

It was at the session that all parties reached a conclusion that NVMe-oF is the inevitable choice in the all-flash era. More importantly, Huawei proposed the Lossless Ethernet Storage Network Solution NoF+, otherwise known as NoF+ Solution, a changing innovation that is designed to unlock the potential of all-flash storage. Zhang Jidong, storage network architect, Bank of China, noted how because the solution supports long-distance lossless transmission of 200km over 100GbE links, slashing 90% cross-DC links compared to FC, it’s a perfect option for intra-city active-active deployments.

With financial services increasing rapidly, volumes are soaring, which requires high data concurrency. In addition, banks everywhere now need to provide 24/7 services, which presents challenges to transaction latency and reliability. The banking industry has always needed reliability infrastructure to prevent huge economic losses caused by data loss and service disruption. In fact, statistics show that, on average, financial data loss or service disruption in the industry run as high as $6.48 million per hour. In such a demanding climate, there is a trend to build an all-flash data center that is reliable, green, and energy-efficient, improving storage performance 100x compared to conventional data center deployments.

The all-flash era acted as a catalyt for new protocol developments, from SCSI to NVMe, and gradually to end-to-end NVMe supporting 3 types of networks (FC, Remote Direct Memory Access over Converged Ethernet, or RoCE, and TCP). Storage networks require high levels of reliability, performance, and ease of use.

Jidong said: “Traditional FC storage networks do not match all-flash NVMe in terms of parallel high-throughput reads/writes, and the major reasons for this is FC networks provide insufficient bandwidth and poor scalability.“

Oceanstor Dorado V3 All Flash storage appliance

NVMe over RoCE has been trending in the all-flash data center era. However, it is prone to issues of packet loss and usability. The company’s NoF+ Solution was released in response to the all-flash and all-IP trends of data center storage. In terms of performance, packet loss is common on a traditional Ethernet network, where a packet loss of 0.1% decreases the network throughput by 50%. By contrast, the company’s NoF+ solution adopts an iLossless algorithm to achieve zero packet loss with 100% storage network throughput, and improves IO/s by 87% and latency by 42% compared to FC. The NoF+ Solution adopts the next-gen OceanStor Dorado AFA and the CloudEngine DC storage network switch to yield performance and reliability, and easier O&M. It was these benefits that attracted Bank of China to commercially deploy the solution in their environments.

Kevin Tolly, founder and CEO, Tolly Group, echoed the thoughts of Jidong and said: “Recently, Tolly was commissioned to run performance tests comparing the Huawei NoF+ Solution which is one NVMe over RoCE solution, vs. an NVMe over FC solution. From the test results, the Huawei NoF+ solution improved the storage performance with up to 93% higher IO/s and 49% lower latency than the FC solution. In HA tests, the Huawei NoF+ solution demonstrated less-than-1-second end-to-end service failover with link and storage module failures. I’m not surprised that the Huawei NoF+ solution received the Best of Show Award at Interop and is favored by customers.“

IDC believes that future is heading with NVM-eoF. There are four main reasons:

• Dropping prices of flash media will accelerate NVMe-oF adoption

• Move to NVMe/PCIe will accelerate end-to-end NVMe

• Emerging workloads will drive growth of NVMe-oF, especially in terms of business application, engineering, and techniques

• NVMe-oF will enable cross-domain data management

• IDC believes that all-flash data centers are almost here, and will certainly come around in the next few years. That will be driven by more capable storage systems, like NoF+. The solution implements end-to-end data acceleration in storage scenarios by leveraging OceanStor Dorado AFAs and CloudEngine data center storage network switches. It takes advantage of the million-level IO/s of all-flash storage and meets the petabyte-level development requirements of the financial industry.