Micron Technology has created a new Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) over Fabric architecture called SolidScale, an integrated platform that delivers low-latency and high performance access to compute and storage.

NVMe over Fabric standard in development is still somewhat immature, but Micron says that the SolidScale software-defined storage architecture will provide the benefits of shared storage with performance of server-side flash.

SolidScale will address the CPU underutilization on the data center, which are starving for data, as NVMe SSDs deployed in application servers today are on average using less than 50 percent of their IOPS and capacity. Micron's scale-out storage infrastructure provides the same benefits of a centralized, single pool of storage with the performance of local in-server SSDs.

SolidScale connects multiple nodes using high-speed RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) Mellanox fabric with low-latency software to deliver a converged infrastructure that performs like local direct attached storage. Micron's reliminary tests of the new platform measured more than 10.9 million IOPS with only three 2U SolidScale nodes. Micron says this tackles the current problem of having to overprovision NVMe SSDs and will bring the technology to the mainstream.

Key features of the new architecture include:

• Flexible Infrastructure: The logical volume feature of the SolidScale platform provides flexibility to create and manage a single, centralized pool of storage that allows customers to create right size volumes for each server's data repository.
• Optimized Performance: The speed of Micron NVMe SSDs coupled with high-bandwidth Mellanox fabric delivers performance that scales by adding an average of five microseconds of additional latency to an application's data path when compared to a local in-server NVMe. Micron SolidScale architecture is expected to reduce end-to-end latency under 200 microseconds. Preliminary tests of the Micron SolidScale platform measured over 10.9M IOPS with only three 2U SolidScale nodes.
• Simple Manageability: The Web-based management interface of the SolidScale platform provides a simple, graphical setup and configuration for key data services.
• Data Center Efficiency: The SolidScale architecture pools the available storage together, providing a platform that can either do the same work with fewer servers or more work in the same number of servers. Overall, this allows compute servers to be thinner, allowing storage to scale independently of compute.

SolidScale is not a product with ship dates or pricing. It's an architecture, which is now available to key Micron customers and partners to test their own application workloads within existing data center environments. Based on customer validation and testing of the architecture, volume production of the Micron SolidScale platform is expected to begin in early 2018.

Micron is not the only company trying to push NVMe SSD adoption forward. Last month, Israeli startup E8 Storage announced it had opted to put HGST's Ultrastar SN200 PCIe SSDs into its NVMe enclosures as part of its efforts to leverage dual port NVMe technology in its all-flash arrays.

Micron's SolidScale architecture has moved the company closer to becoming a storage company, a path it started down last year with the opening of its Micron Storage Solutions Centerin Austin, Texas.