The storage industry has made a quantum leap in performance and latency with solid-state storage. Now storage networking technologies are playing catch-up so applications can utilize the maximum performance and low latency that solid-state technology offers. New fabric capabilities that increase performance and scale are a great start.
Traditional fabric architecture (Ethernet, Infiniband and standard PCIe) were designed to communicate with HDD storage systems using single-threaded sequential communication processes. There was a huge performance gap between compute power and storage. The advent of solid-state storage shifted the bottleneck from the storage device to the interconnection between storage and compute.
However, today that is changing. A3CUBE Inc. recently created new PCIe-based fabric technologies that extend the distance capabilities of PCIe. PCIe historically was only used inside of servers and storage systems because of distance limitations. Extending the distance capabilities of PCIe means it can be used in a fabric network between servers and solid-state storage arrays. This is great for accelerating and scaling more performance for all-flash arrays. It also offers a high-speed and highly scalable PCIe-based interconnect between servers and flash storage within a rack or up to 100 meters using a standard optical cable.
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