The storage sector is located in two dead ends that do not meet the needs of the industry. There are two key factors that make more than one company that is dedicated to data sleepy: speed and capacity, without underestimating reliability. The sector has seen how the steps are reduced and the time is extended, but the needs do not stop growing, so they are rethinking the future of it, which and curiously we all know for a long time: NVMe.
The industry works almost exclusively and mainly with two well-known interfaces such as SAS and SATA . The problem is that neither of them has advanced so much as to solve the problems mentioned above and they are not exactly an example of speed and their discs are struggling to increase their capacity without losing the much sought after reliability.
The debate has focused on a competitor that is giving great results and where large companies work tirelessly, has a promising future, few limitations and all the advantages that could be desired.
You have to change the block access protocol to make it universal
Yes, it is true that there are only two interfaces, but in the end SAS is nothing more than serially connected SCSI systems in large companies and although it has such interesting features as error and block recovery, full duplex and others, the protocol has aged badly , without innovation and with difficulty for the current compatibility of systems with more advanced software.
SATA for its part is more a technology focused on low cost, not in vain can only read or write, but not both at the same time and drags part of the problems of PATA. Both protocols share a common feature that is precisely on the table: their access is serial, which limits performance and scalability, even adding latency in certain cases.
Why continue with them then? Isn’t there a block access protocol that can be universal and where the industry sets goals by reducing costs for everyone? Yes, there is one that is known to all and that already has the approval of the common PC industry and now also that of consoles.
NVMe, the unification of all protocols in a single interface
We are not going to determine all the advantages of the protocol, but basically it comes down to being a full duplex, it is much faster than SAS and SATA, it has much faster access to the data host, it connects directly to the CPU and it is being updated permanently thanks to the push of the gaming sector and high performance servers through PCIe and its new versions.
The three named protocols fulfill the same basic function, are compatible with block access and therefore can be used with either security tapes, disks or SSDs. So where is the problem? Serial access of the first two.
Although they are compatible, the current protocol to interconnect them involves a loss of bandwidth that is not justifiable if what we want is to increase performance. For this reason, the industry is seriously considering creating a universal NVMe interface that simplifies the system and allows unrestricted access to the various protocols without loss of performance and with all the advantages.
This fact, if finally carried out by giants such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google or Amazon, would mean the future takeoff of units such as HDDs, where multiple actuators would exceed the theoretical performance of 600 MB / s of SATA 3 . Also, this assumes free and transparent compatibility for NVMe and TCP arrays, or NVMe and GPUs.
The most pertinent question would be, when will this new universal interface arrive? Apparently, everyone has already sat at the table several times (the last one in the Open Compute Project ), companies, manufacturers and standards creators, the pact and definition of it is quite advanced as suggested by some giants from the cloud sector on several occasions and given such support, it is expected that it will not take longer than 2025, where the industry will change radically.