StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator

Existing storage protocols — iSCSI, iSER, FC, NFS, and SMB3 — proved to be inefficient in working with network-attached flash. These protocols were designed to work with spinning disks and, consequently, inherited various resulting limitations, like single short command queue. When used with NVMe SSDs, said protocol cuts off up to 50% of performance along with increasing the CPU toll on client systems. From the financial perspective, this is a significant waste of costs as 30-40% of NVMe SSDs, CPU cores, and associated licenses need to be purchased only to compensate for the legacy protocol's inefficiency. For ROBOs and Edge deployments, this waste gets multiplied by hundreds and thousands of times simply due to the sheer number of locations.

To date, there are no built-in tools in Windows for working with network-attached NVMe SSDs. NVMe-oF, the protocol that enables SQL, M&E applications, and VMs to get all the performance from NVMe Flash, isn't available on Windows. As a result, Microsoft clients cannot get the best performance and latency for their applications. There are some NVMe-oF-ready network cards (NICs) for Windows and Windows Server applications to work with NVMe Flash over the network. Yet, upgrading the whole interconnect with NVMe-oF capable NICs and switches for all existing systems will remain a very costly project in the foreseeable future.

NVMe-oF keeps the latency of NVMe drives connected via the network as low as 20-30 microseconds. Applications "feel" no difference between flash connected over the network or one attached directly. The single 64-command queue is replaced with 64 thousand queues, 64 thousand commands each. This design allows getting all the performance NVMe SSDs have to offer. The flash-centric design of NVMe-oF also results in a lower CPU toll on the IOPS delivered to your applications. You can benefit from this either by provisioning more CPU resources to the applications or VMs or by shrinking the system size and thereby also cutting costs on OS and backup per-core licenses as well as become more efficient with power and cooling.

StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator is the only software solution for Windows, allowing you to get all the benefits of network-connected NVMe storage. It is a software module that connects any Windows or Windows Server host to the NVMe-oF ( NVMe/TCP and NVMe/RoCE ) storage target. Using TCP enables organizations to leverage their existing networking for working with shared storage. The RoCE solution does require RoCE-capable Mellanox, Intel, or Broadcom cards but it also allows your applications and VMs to talk to the storage over RDMA, resulting in all I/O bypassing the CPU. As a result, there are more CPU resources to directly support your workloads.

Get StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator to unlock superior performance and efficiency for your Hyper-V VMs, SQL, and M&E workflow applications!

You can check out the latest updates for StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator in the Release Notes.