The digital economy driven by data value is becoming the main model to promote social progress, and digital transformation driven by various innovative technologies has become the core of global change. In this process, data has become a new means of production, which has promote

The digital economy driven by data value is becoming the main model to promote social progress. digital transformation driven by various innovative technologies has become the core of global change. In this process, data has become a new means of production, which has promoted the technological evolution of enterprise storage and allowed new technologies to drive changes in the storage industry.

At the same time, the proliferation of massive data and the enrichment of unstructured data and other data types have put forward new demands for data center storage. Therefore, SSD and NVMe high-speed interconnect protocols have gradually become the main development direction of data center storage.

Especially in response to the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic and new digital challenges, ultra-large-scale cloud and enterprise-level data centers, especially users in the financial industry, have accelerated their adoption of NVMe and NVMe-oF while continuing to cope with the rapid growth of data. Solution adoption and upgrades.

1

NVMe SSD Behind the high growth is the surging power of digitalization

The digital transformation of the industry has enabled the performance of data centers to develop rapidly. Servers have evolved from single-core to multi-core, from x86 to GPU heterogeneous computing, and the processing power has increased by more than a hundred times, which is also driven by this. Rapid innovation in data center storage.

The storage medium has been completely switched from HDD to SSD, and the performance has also been improved a hundred times. However, after computing and storage broke through the performance ceiling, network protocols became a new performance bottleneck in the data center. This is the meaning of the birth of NVMe.

As early as 2010, NVMe emerged as a hard disk interface protocol. Its goal is to fully utilize the performance of SSD media particles and release the potential of the storage system. Since then, NVMe SSD has gradually been widely adopted by cloud service providers with extremely high performance requirements.

NVMe contains a set of specifications for how software communicates with storage. It works with multiple data transfer methods , including PCI Express, RDMA and TCP. The storage array that supports the NVMe standard has higher performance, and its ultra-high-speed storage media is more direct and efficient than any other method.

Obviously, the development of SSD also depends on NVMe, which combines speed, efficiency, capacity and cost-effective scalability, and NVMe-oF solutions will help the industry to reach a new level. In particular, many high-performance application requirements and business-critical application requirements are driving the further deployment of NVMe in data centers everywhere.

Today, NVMe SSD has surpassed SATA and SAS SSD in the proportion of solid state drives in data centers and has become the most important category of data center storage.

There are many reasons for driving the mainstreaming of NVMe SSD, but in the final analysis it is because industry users face the challenge of data surge and have higher requirements for performance, stability and response speed. At the same time, the rapid rise of SSD also requires better Ground network interconnection technology is used to match the increase in computing power at the same frequency.

In other words, behind the rapid growth of NVMe SSD is the surging power of digital transformation.

2

Why does financial digitalization love NVMe?

The financial industry has always been the vanguard of digital transformation.

With the "14th Five-Year Plan for Digital Economy Development", the Central Bank "Financial Technology Development Plan (2022-2025)", China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission "Guiding Opinions on the Digital Transformation of the Banking and Insurance Industry" and other series of Driven by policies, the digital transformation of the banking industry has gradually entered a new stage of "acceleration".

The more stable the foundation of digital transformation infrastructure, the higher the efficiency of innovation, and starting with data infrastructure is undoubtedly the key to laying a solid foundation. As NVMe technology and ecosystem mature, end-to-end NVMe solutions have become the first choice for digital transformation application innovation.

We know that for bank data centers, storage construction is of great importance. Once the construction is completed, it is necessary to ensure that there will be no performance bottlenecks in the storage layer in upper-layer applications for at least 5 years. With the rapid development of flash memory technology, all-flash storage has become With the standard configuration of each mainstream storage manufacturer, combined with the application of NVMe technology in controllers and hard disk enclosures, IOPS has increased from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of traditional mechanical hard disk storage to millions of levels, and performance has been greatly improved.

Therefore, under today's situation, when bank customers purchase new storage, all-flash storage has become the first choice, and all-flash storage equipped with NVMe SSD is the best choice.

Take Hua Xia Bank as an example. It builds an end-to-end NVMe verification environment to improve the controllability of its sustainable business development. It also uses end-to-end NVMe solutions to carry production services for some new services to meet the needs of digital transformation services. It is reported that through the testing and implementation of the end-to-end NVMe solution, Hua Xia Bank has laid the foundation for the subsequent improvement of the overall ecosystem including operating systems, databases, upper-layer application software, etc., and has accumulated experience in selecting some business systems for the transformation of the NVMe over Fabric+ solution. .

and then Bank of China , after comprehensively sorting out the IT infrastructure architecture, identified that the traditional data storage based on FC (Fiber Chanel Fiber Channel Protocol) closed technology in the financial production system has reached the window period for change, and has firmly opened up in the banking industry. Innovative construction of new generation storage network. Among them, technological innovation is carried out in two aspects: storage media and storage protocols. Relying on the hundreds-fold performance improvement of storage media, it has driven the development of storage protocols from the traditional serial SCSI protocol to the high-speed parallel NVMe protocol. It further ensures the high throughput and low latency characteristics of the all-flash NVMe protocol. In the remote direct storage read (RDMA) scenario, the new generation storage network needs to meet the requirements of zero packet loss, low latency and high throughput.

We know that the core of the Bank 4.0 era is not just technological progress or product iteration, but also a change in thinking mode. A comprehensive digital transformation must be carried out from the decision-making level from top to bottom. The financial industry may even regard itself as For technology companies created by the financial system. This requires the underlying data infrastructure to be both stable and agile, which is also the key to the NVMe SSD solution becoming the first choice in the financial industry.

Objectively speaking, the digital experience of the financial industry can provide guidance for other industries. NVMe SSD will also become the "digital base" for the digital transformation of thousands of industries.

3

Breaking the innovation bottleneck of NVMe

For enterprises, the storage challenge is essentially a data challenge.

The COVID-19 epidemic has promoted the rapid development of the "online" mode, resulting in the emergence of new applications and the continuous generation of new data forms. The large number of unstructured data such as text, pictures, audio and video has increased the difficulty of data processing. At the same time, data The change in form further promotes the change in the form of storage.

Therefore, the rise of all-flash memory is not only due to the inertia of IT pursuing efficiency, but also driven by business. For example, during e-commerce shopping festivals, database processing peaks can often reach tens of millions of times per second. The peak transaction volume per second is more than the average daily processing volume. The underlying IT infrastructure is under great pressure. Another example is that the proportion of "online" business gradually exceeds the proportion of daily business, which also leads to doubling of the pressure on data center storage.

This pressure will be fed back to the core trading system. Frequent business surges will lead to an increase in concurrent visits to the IT system, seriously affecting customer experience. For privacy, NVMe SSD, as a more reliable, faster, and space-saving option, is the most efficient path for the industry's digital transformation.

But NVMe is not a panacea, and it also has its own bottlenecks that need to be overcome. For example, how to ensure high security while maintaining high performance? How to make NVMe SSD support hot swapping to ensure a better usability experience? How to store more data while reducing space usage and energy consumption? etc.

In the industry, Huawei is the first to implement a full range of end-to-end NVMe products, self-developed ASIC interface module, self-developed ASIC SSD disk/frame design, and NVMe from the aspects of protocol analysis, IO forwarding, business priority, hardware acceleration, etc. Provide comprehensive support and provide high-speed channels for data transmission.

At the same time, through optimized design of Huawei OceanStor Dorado, the NVMe protocol can reduce 40% of the host network protocol stack overhead compared to the SCSI protocol, saving host CPU consumption and supporting more host applications with the same performance; in addition, CPU and SSD Direct communication between disks shortens the transmission path, increases the number of protocol concurrencies to 64K, reduces the number of protocol interactions from 4 to 2, and more than doubles the read and write request processing efficiency. According to Huawei laboratory environment test data, in the 8K IO and 100% read scenario, the end-to-end latency of OceanStor Dorado can be reduced from 562us to 50us, which is a 10-fold reduction in latency.

It is worth mentioning that because Huawei can not only achieve end-to-end NVMe at the high-end, but also at the mid- to low-end, it is said to support the full range of end-to-end NVMe. This is good news for customers from all walks of life. To move towards digitalization quickly and steadily, NVMe SSD is worth owning by any enterprise.