Broadcast Beat Magazine 2018 NAB Show Edition | Page 72
However, even larger post-production facilities
who have already spent a considerable amount
of money in their Fibre Channel equipment, and
understandably want to protect and retain their
investment, might want to consider an alternative
before spending even more for upgrading to the
latest bandwidth standard of 32Gb.
This is a game-changer, as smaller facilities that
maybe weren’t able to compete in a world in
which resolutions, and therefore workloads, are
constantly rising, can now handle larger hi-res
projects without the investment in costly Fibre
Channel infrastructure.
The optimal deployment of NVMe
NVMe changes the world of media storage –
finally also boosting Ethernet performance
Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is the
incredibly fast flash storage that sheds a whole
new light on storage performance. The most obvi-
ous advantage of NVMe is that, just like SSDs,
it uses memory chips instead of spinning disks;
hence, no delays due to mechanical head seeks
that occur with HDDs. Unlike SSDs though that
usually connect through the SATA or SAS bus
interface, NVMe connects through the lightning
fast Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
(PCIe) bus. As the mode of operation of the PCIe
bus is much more similar to that of the CPU, the
overall performance is increased tremendously,
boosting the bandwidth close to the bandwidth
of the random access memory (RAM). This com-
bination allows NVMe over PCIe to handle many
more simultaneous I/O requests – up to 1.2 million
IOPS, to be precise, with close-to-zero latency!
As enterprise NVMe is still significantly more
expensive than consumer grade SSDs – let alone
HDDs – building an entire storage array from the
fast flash storage is probably not an option, at
least not if budget is limited. Considering that the
requirements in storage space in post-production
is constantly rising as well, a mere NVMe storage
RAID would probably be unaffordable, at least
when compared to spinning disks.
Yet, NVMe can still provide noticeable benefits for
environments generating unstructured data with
insatiable demands on storage space. Utilizing
NVMe in the NAS server allows for taking advan-
tage of the new technology - without breaking
the bank.
Enhanced Ethernet for smaller post-produc-
tion facilities If a state-of-the-art NAS head can support
100Gbit Ethernet and remote direct memory
access (RDMA), the NVMe flash storage, as a
transparent cache on the server level, boosts the
network performance to levels comparable to
Fibre Channel. Another clear benefit of deploying
NVMe on the server level shows in significantly
lower CPU consumption, leaving more CPU power
for applications. And in case of a power outage,
the most recently used media files would remain
in the non-volatile memory (NVMe) based cache,
as opposed to being lost with any standard RAM.
Fortunately, utilizing NVMe over PCIe slowly but
surely makes its way into pure NAS environ-
ments, which opens vast opportunities to benefit
from this new technology, especially for smaller
post-production facilities and production islands.
Instead of investing in a pure Fibre Channel-based
infrastructure, or a hybrid Fibre Channel/Ethernet
set-up to ensure high performance for worksta-
tions that need fast and latency-free bandwidth,
the more cost-efficient Ethernet protocol now
provides Fibre Channel-like performance for the
entire storage environment. In summary: NVMe on the server level can boost
throughput and overall bandwidth in an Ethernet
environment to Fibre Channel-like performance.
With an overhead of multi-stream concurrency of
close to zero, and no moving parts on the solid-
state NVMe, allocation and fragmentation issues
on the file system become irrelevant on the trans-
parent cache. So, if zero latency is required, as
well as exceptionally high parallel stream count in
non-linear editing (NLE) applications, and huge
random IO performance is necessary, a NAS envi-
ronment utilizing NVMe may be your solution.
Some storage vendors offer hybrid storage arrays
using spinning disks (HDD), solid state disks
(SSD) and now NVMe. So far the performance
boost through NVMe is mainly available in larger
SAN set-ups though.
72 • Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com