SATA has served the PC industry well for a long time, and is a great solution for spinning media storage. As the industry moves to hybrid and solid-state storage however, SATA is stressed to provide the same value. With SATA Express entering the market, it appears that PCIe will become the dominant physical layer transport for storage. Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a technology that streamlines access to SSDs. Today, SSD performance is hampered by the 6G SATA PHY and the SATA protocol, which was designed for spinning media. NVMe takes advantages of the multi-lane PCIe PHY, and defines an interface designed with SSDs in mind. In this article NVM Express and SATA are compared, along with the involvement of PCIe with NVMe.
IOL Blog: Storage Technologies
Creating a Converged Data Center
By Matthew Goepfert - August 28, 2012
Fibre Channel (FC) is a networking technology that was formally introduced in 1994 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). FC operates at various Gigabit speeds, typically using fiber-optic cable as a transmission medium (although copper cables can be used), and is used in Storage Area Networks (SAN). FC provides its own fabric and is a completely separate technology from Ethernet. Chances are that most people have heard the word "Ethernet" and have at least some idea of what it is used for ("computers or something, right?"). On the same note, it is also very likely that those same people have never even heard of "Fibre Channel" ("what the heck is that?"). This is because Ethernet is such a ubiquitous/widely-accepted technology that is integral to networks across the world and is here to stay. FC can be seen as "lagging" Ethernet in performance. While Ethernet has recently introduced 40/100Gb speeds and has Terabit Ethernet on the horizon, FC has just come out with 16Gb and is looking into 32Gb. FC is not without its benefits though. FC is: reliable, congestion free, and efficient. Wouldn't it be nice if there was some way to converge both of these technologies into one universal fabric?
A First Experience with Fibre Channel
By Matthew Goepfert - June 28, 2012
My name is Matthew Goepfert, and I work in the Fibre Channel (FC) Consortium. I am currently a junior majoring in Information Technology (IT). Upon ending my sophomore year this past winter, I was in need of a job that would give me hands-on experience with some aspect of IT. I have always had a particular interest in computer networking and plan on getting involved with system/network administration upon graduation. I had heard many positive remarks about the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) from several students at UNH regarding the vast knowledge and experience that people obtain from working there. After applying and being accepted at the start of this past spring semester, I found out that I would be working in the FC Consortium. Up until that point, I had never even heard about FC, let alone had any actual experience with it. This would soon change, as I have gained a very personal level of knowledge regarding the technology from performing various tests on FC devices.
Complications of DCB Interoperability Testing
By Daniel Shea - January 9, 2012
iSCSI over Data Center Bridging (DCB) interoperability testing verifies the functionality of the DCB protocol when integrated with iSCSI traffic among a set of devices from a variety of vendors. Throughout the testing process, several device topologies are incorporated to observe behavior in a collection of scenarios. Since the technology is still in a relatively early stage, the protocols defining its implementation are subject to change. As a result, this creates a small set of complications that must be addressed in order to successfully carry out the testing procedure.
- « first
- ‹ previous
- 1
- 2
- 3