Statista estimates shipments of SSDs will surpass HDDs for the first time in 2021. And according to Research and Markets, the enterprise flash storage market will grow 17% annually to about $25 billion in revenue by 2024.
Sales are being driven by the big-four hyperscale cloud providers -- Alibaba, AWS, Google and Microsoft -- along with co-location facilities that together are replacing many enterprise data centers.
In the past, the easiest way for flash storage to compete with hard drives in the enterprise market was to adopt existing HDD physical and interface standards.
SSDs using SAS and SATA interfaces were predominant in the market until a couple of years ago. However, in late 2017, the use of NVMe high-performance SSDs exploded and surpassed the total capacity of SATA enterprise drives shipped by mid-2018.
There are several reasons to prefer NVMe high-performance SSDs over SATA drives. They include:
The NVMe protocol was designed for non-volatile semiconductor memory like NAND flash and next-generation non-volatile technologies like 3D XPoint, such as Intel Optane, and resistive and magneto-resistive memories, such as those provided by Everspin and Avalanche Technology. It significantly streamlines the I/O protocol and removes other limitations of HDD protocols.
NVMe supports as many as 64K queues with as many as 64K entries versus 254 in SAS and 32 in SATA. NVMe is also optimized for multicore non-uniform memory access processors to allow multiple cores to share ownership of queues. The protocol also doesn't require I/O locking and has other features that allow performance to scale with the number of cores available in a system.
The NVMe command set is simpler and more streamlined, with less overhead than SAS or SATA, requiring half or fewer processor instructions per I/O request as HDD protocols. This efficiency translates to higher IOPS throughput and lower latency. The command set also includes advanced features such as reservations and power management that further improve system efficiency.
NVMe efficiently supports I/O virtualization technologies like single root I/O virtualization and provides extensive error reporting and management features.
NVMe will be the foundation for enterprise storage by 2020 and an increasing number of workloads will require NVMe for low latency, high throughput, storage density and rapid storage array rebuild times.
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