Excelero Debuts Excelero NVEdge, Software for Creating NVMe All Flash Arrays (NAFA) From High-Availability (HA) Servers

Excelero today announced Excelero NVEdge, block storage software for creating NVMe All-Flash Arrays (NAFAs) that leverage traditional controller-based high availability (HA) storage architectures. Targeted at OEMs, large integrators and Tech Giants that are building disaggregated NAFA solutions, Excelero NVEdge delivers the world’s fastest NVMe AFA performance, demonstrating over 2.7M 4K IOPs on a 100Gb link – achieving full bandwidth while being thin provisioned at up to a 1000X oversubscription rate. Excelero NVEdge software realizes the highest performance levels while providing important enterprise storage features for simplified deployment, efficiency and operation.

With NVMe-based arrays using NVMe over Fabric host connections expected to drive more than 50% of all external primary storage revenue by 2021, Excelero NVEdge enables x86 systems and those based around SmartNIC-based architectures to take maximum advantage of NVMe SSDs with demanding and fast-growing application categories such as AI, ML, GPU and Edge computing. It delivers Excelero’s hallmark extreme IOPs performance, throughput and cost efficiency via the NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF) protocol – supporting NVMeoF standards.

Excelero NVEdge is block storage software targeted for two underserved markets:

• Cloud data centers where a rack is a single failure domain, yet disaggregated NVMe single-chassis storage needed to be HA.
• Deployments requiring an HA NVMe storage array with local NVMe performance, but without the need for massive scale.

The software enables OEMs to build a scale-up NVMe flash array on their choice of HA hardware, using Excelero’s proven software approach. Excelero NVEdge replaces the need for proprietary block drivers with NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF), and provides an elegant answer for settings demanding high availability as well as exceptional performance.

A fully standards-compliant NVMeoF target, Excelero NVEdge supports HA x86 systems as well as newer SmartNIC-based platforms such as Mellanox BlueField and Broadcom Stingray. Based in part on SPDK for writing high performance, scalable, user-mode storage applications, NVEdge supports both RDMA and TCP/IP networking, and includes features for data protection, thin provisioning, and checksums.

In testing against many block storage solutions at a partner’s lab, Excelero’s was the only solution to reach full bandwidth at 4K IO across a 100Gbps network with thin provisioned logical volumes.

“The integration of the Excelero NVMeoF target solution and the BlueField SmartNIC SNAP feature enables customers to build their own disaggregated flash storage solution and benefit from the higher efficiency achieved by utilizing NVMe in a central server,” said Dror Goldenberg, SVP SW Architecture at Mellanox. “They can enjoy exceptionally low latency and reach full bandwidth across a 100gbE network. We are extremely happy about the collaboration between the two teams and the innovation that we create together.”

“Throughout its history, Excelero has pursued a software-defined storage strategy that offered maximum deployment flexibility for their customers,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president in the Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group at IDC. “Excelero already supports a wide variety of different server-based storage nodes, but the Excelero NVEdge announcement further extends the choice of deployment options to customers that need to deploy high performance NVMe-based storage in a single chassis, commodity hardware platform that also needs to support high availability.”

“Excelero already delivered the highest performance solution for scale-out NVMe, and now, by adding Excelero NVEdge to our distributed NVMe product line, we also provide the highest performance solution for scale-up NVMe,” said Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder. “We’re providing even wider options for our customers, and offering OEMs, integrators and tech giants a simplified path to delivering the most efficient disaggregated NVMe-based solutions on the market.”