Author: Ted Vojnovich

25 Questions (and Answers) on Ethernet-attached SSDs

Ted Vojnovich
The SNIA Networking Storage Forum celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by hosting a live webcast, “Ethernet-attached SSDs – Brilliant Idea or Storage Silliness?” Even though we didn’t serve green beer during the event, the response was impressive with hundreds of live attendees who asked many great questions – 25 to be exact. Our expert presenters have answered them all here: Q. Has a prototype drive been built today that includes the Ethernet controller inside the NVMe SSD? Read More

Are Ethernet-attached SSDs Brilliant?

Ted Vojnovich
Several solid state disk (SSD) and networking vendors have demonstrated ways to connect SSDs directly to an Ethernet network. They propose that deploying Ethernet SSDs will be more scalable, easier to manage, higher performance, and/or lower cost than traditional storage networking solutions that use a storage controller (or hyperconverged node) between the SSDs and the network. Who would want to attach SSDs directly to the network? Are these vendors brilliant or simply trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist? What are the different solutions that could benefit from Ethernet SSDs? Which protocols would one use to access them? How will orchestration be used to enable applications to find assigned Ethernet SSDs? How will Ethernet SSDs affect server subsystems such as Ethernet RAID/mirroring and affect solution management such as Ethernet SAN orchestration?  And how do Ethernet SSDs relate to computational storage? Read More