Dell Technologies Inc. today announced its support for a new connectivity standard that will be implemented across its storage, networking and compute platforms.

The company promises the new NVMe/TCP protocol will deliver faster software-defined connectivity to meet the needs of data on demand at the network edge. Dell said its supporting NVMe/TCP through its new NVMe IP SAN portfolio that’s based on Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabrics technology, an extension of the NVMe network protocol to Ethernet and Fibre Channel that enables faster and more efficient connectivity between storage and servers. A key part of the announcement is that Dell is partnering with VMware Inc. to enable servers and storage to discover each other more efficiently.

In a blog post, Ihab Tarazi, chief technology officer and senior vice president of network and solutions at Dell, explained that NVMe over Fabrics are the ideal solution for both next-generation workloads and existing applications and environments, delivering significant performance improvements with lower latency.

The company has explored the use of various NVMe over Fabrics transport protocols and Tarazi said it opted to focus on NVMe/TCP thanks to its ability to scale up to much higher speeds and at a lower cost than the alternative NVMe/FC protocol.

“Its biggest strength is its ability to leverage the standard networking infrastructure and the ongoing investments being made to Ethernet, especially in support of cloud connectivity that is constantly pushing the need for more bandwidth and lower latency,” Tarazi said.

NVMe/TCP has other advantages too. For instance, it doesn’t require any specialized networking configuration, Dell said. It’s also immune to congestion spreading, which is when network congestion extends back to the source of the data.

Analyst Steve McDowell of Moor Insights & Strategy told SiliconANGLE that Dell’s decision to embrace NVMe/TCP rather than NVMe/FC is a little surprising, since most of its competitors in the storage world have gone in the other direction. He said a lot of enterprises prefer NVMe/FC because it allows them to leverage their existing investments in FC switches and adapter cards. NVMe/TCP is more of a long-term bet, he said, though it has big appeal with non-FC enterprises deploying greenfield applications.

“The bigger news is that Dell, along with VMware, has extended the NVMe/TCP standard to solve inefficiencies around how servers and storage discover each other,” McDowell said. “This is what they’re calling NVMe IP SAN.”

Tarazi said Dell has worked closely with VMware to enable centralized discovery for NVMe/TCP to ensure storage connectivity can be automated at scale and co-exist with older protocols.

Dell’s new SmartFabric Storage Software product is the key to enabling automated storage connectivity. SFSS enables host and storage interfaces to register with a Centralized Discovery Controller. Administrators can use this to create and activate zoning configurations and automatically notify hosts of new storage resources. The storage hosts will then be able to connect to the new resources automatically, Tarazi explained.

The partnership with VMware means NVMe/TCP is the most suitable option for enterprises that are focused on serving network-attached storage between virtual machines within VMware clusters, or within vSAN environments, McDowell said.

Customers will also be able to implement Dell EMC PowerSwitch and SmartFabric Services to automate the configuration of switches that make up their NVMe IP SAN.

Tarazi said NVMe/TCP has been integrated with Dell EMC PowerStore storage arrays, with support for both Direct Discovery and Centralize Discovery. Support for Dell EMC’s PowerMax and PowerFlex hardware will be added in a future release, Tarazi said.

As well as building and implementing the new protocol, Tarazi said Dell is contributing to the NVMe-oF ecosystem by maintaining the open-source CDC Client that can be used by different Linux distributions to support discovery automation.

McDowell said that’s another surprising move, since Dell has not historically been a major contributor to open source, especially in the storage area.

“Dell is joining the NVMe-over-fabric community in a big way,” he said. “This not only makes Dell the most prominent supporter of NVMe-over-TCP, but its extensions to the protocol to address some of the discovery inefficiencies places it a little bit in the driver’s seat. Dell’s competitors are more focused on NVMe-over-Fibre Channel, so it should be fun watching this market unfold.”

Dell said the new NVMe IP SAN solution will become available next month.

Image: Dell