NVMesh 2 – A Compelling Sequel From Excelero

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The Announcement

Excelero recently announced NVMesh 2 – the next iteration of their NVMesh product. NVMesh is a software-only solution designed to pool NVMe-based PCIe SSDs.

[image courtesy of Excelero]

Key Features

There are three key features that have been added to NVMesh.

  • MeshConnect – adding support for traditional network technologies TCP/IP and Fibre Channel, giving NVMesh the widest selection of supported protocols and fabrics of software-defined storage platforms along with already supported InfiniBand, RoCE v2, RDMA and NVMe-oF.
  • MeshProtect – offering flexible protection levels for differing application needs, including mirrored and parity-based redundancy.
  • MeshInspect – with performance analytics for pinpointing anomalies quickly and at scale.

Performance

Excelero have said that NVMesh delivers “shared NVMe at local performance and 90+% storage efficiency that helps further drive down the cost per GB”.

Protection

There’s also a range of protection options available now. Excelero tell me that you can start at level 0 (no protection, lowest latency) all the way to “MeshProtect 10+2 (distributed dual parity)”. This allows customers to “choose their preferred level of performance and protection. [While] Distributing data redundancy services eliminates the storage controller bottleneck.”

Visibility

One of my favourite things about NVMesh 2 is the MeshInspect feature, with a “built-in statistical collection and display, stored in a scalable NoSQL database”.

[image courtesy of Excelero]

 

Thoughts And Further Reading

Excelero emerged form stealth mode at Storage Field Day 12. I was impressed with their offering back then, and they continue to add features while focussing on delivering top notch performance via a software-only solution. It feels like there’s a lot of attention on NVMe-based storage solutions, and with good reason. These things can go really, really fast. There are a bunch of startups with an NVMe story, and the bigger players are all delivering variations on these solutions as well.

Excelero seem well placed to capitalise on this market interest, and their decision to focus on a software-only play seems wise, particularly given that some of the standards, such as NVMe over TCP, haven’t been fully ratified yet. This approach will also appeal to the aspirational hyperscalers, because they can build their own storage solution, source their own devices, and still benefit from a fast software stack that can deliver performance in spades. Excelero also supports a wide range of transports now, with the addition of NVMe over FC and TCP support.

NVMesh 2 looks to be smoothing some of the rougher edges that were present with version 1, and I’m pumped to see the focus on enhanced visibility via MeshInspect. In my opinion these kinds of tools are critical to the uptake of solutions such as NVMesh in both the enterprise and cloud markets. The broadening of the connectivity story, as well as the enhanced resiliency options, make this something worth investigating. If you’d like to read more, you can access a white paper here (registration required).