NVMe SSD? Not yet, says Pure, but promises to deliver it

FlashArray//M customers will get souped-up protocol

Pure's NVMe-Ready Guarantee promises every newly purchased FlashArray//M can be upgraded to full NVMe through their Evergreen Storage program.

NVM Express (NVMe) is a standard memory-class protocol for CPU-to-media communication, and came into being generally as a standard driver for PCIe-connected flash cards. The protocol features 64K parallel queues in comparison to single-channel SAS devices. It's now getting extended to SSDs generally, as slower SAS and SATA protocols get consigned to disk interconnect-only use.

Industry analysts forecast that NVMe will become the leading interface protocol for flash by 2019, and will also be used for forthcoming solid-state media such as 3D Xpoint.

Matt Kixmoeller, Pure's VP for Products, says in a canned quote: "Pure... is best positioned to lead the industry transition to NVMe." He is maybe forgetting that Dell EMC's DSSD array already uses NVMe, as does Mangstor’s MX-Series array. Both these systems also use an extended form of NVMe, NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeF), using RDMA techniques to vanquish shared array network latency.

Pure says it engineered FlashArray//M to be NVMe-ready more than three years ago. Also every FlashArray//M ships with dual-ported and hot-pluggable NVMe NV-RAM devices, an industry first when released in 2015. But Pure has not broken ground in shipping NVMe SSDs.

The FlashArray//M chassis is wired for both SAS and PCIe/NVMe in every flash module slot, which enables the use of SAS-connected flash modules today as well as a transition to NVMe in the future. Pure says customers will be able to convert any FlashArray//M to NVMe-enabled controllers and capacity without a forklift upgrade or disruptive migration.

Upgrades to Pure NVMe-enabled controllers are planned to be generally available prior to 31 December 2017; a lot of room there. The full terms of the NVMe-Ready Guarantee are available upon request from Pure Storage. ®