Unleash the Power of Flash with Fibre Channel

The evolution of the storage infrastructure has reached a new inflection point with the introduction of flash technology. Flash-based storage is now common-place in server architectures, joining spinning disk and tape in secondary storage environments. Flash technology, as it is used in conjunction with big data applications, may eventually propel the development of secondary storage architectures away from disk.

As the next-generation data center slowly emerges, where flash arrays support high-performance enterprise applications, the connection to these arrays is a critical architectural component to ensure optimal performance. By utilizing a purpose-built, lossless fabric, a Fibre Channel-based storage area network (SAN) is still the best way to unleash the power of flash storage and deliver the best performance for mission-critical, latency-sensitive applications.

Drive Better Performance from Storage

All Flash Arrays (AFAs) speed access to data, doubling IOPs while reducing latency. This performance can only be realized if the connection between high-power workstations, enterprise servers and storage is matched for speed, reliability and consistency in data transfers. The best way to achieve this is by upgrading a legacy Fibre Channel SAN to the latest 32Gb Gen 7 technology. A Fibre Channel SAN is a purpose-built technology that uses a block-level protocol for speeding access to storage and is already deployed widely in most enterprises. Unlike Ethernet, Fibre Channel is highly efficient and has very low overhead and low latency. Data delivery is fast, in-order, lossless and predictable.

Flash drives are very fast, both in throughput and I/Os per second. With the advent of Gen 7 Fibre Channel, you are now capable of up to 12.8GB/s and 5 million IOPs using a quad-port 32Gb Celerity™ Fibre Channel card. This results in the ability to sustain performance to a considerably great number of flash drives, optimizing your investment in an AFA.

ATTO’s 25-plus year heritage of pioneering Fibre Channel and solid-state disk (SSD) connectivity solutions continues with our ATTO Celerity 32Gb Gen 7 Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), available in single- and dual-port options. All cards are available in target and initiator modes and deliver the highest bandwidth and lowest latency available in the market. The latest 32Gb HBAs deliver twice the maximum throughput of previous generations allowing you to connect more SSDs and drive better performance from AFAs.

The ATTO Advantage: Higher IOPS, Lower Latency, Better Reliability

ATTO has engineered a custom, finely tuned Fibre Channel stack that offers unique performance advantages and is trusted to support the most latency-sensitive, real-time applications on the market. ATTO Advanced Data Streaming™ (ADS) technology is built into every HBA and manages latency in real-time for the smoothest data streaming and best-in-industry data transfers. Our proprietary ATTO MultiPath Director™ (MPD) driver allows server connection to AFAs that have dual redundant controllers, increasing performance and reliability. MPD functionality enables multiple Fibre Channel connections to run in parallel and load balance across the AFA controller ports, allowing servers to take full advantage of the power from your storage system. MPD is also faster and easier to use than the multipath I/O (MPIO) solutions natively built into Windows® and Linux® because of its robust management features and intuitive graphical user interface (GUI).

Celerity HBAs have been designed with unique interrupt coalescing technology that allows more packets to be queued before CPU processing occurs. This optimizes CPU performance and allows server applications to process more data in a given period of time matching the performance of flash SSDs which typically respond to I/O requests approximately 1,000 times faster than hard drives.

ATTO Fibre Channel HBAs support 128 commands in flight compared to 64 from the competition. By keeping twice the number of commands in flight, Celerity reduces latency in high transaction environments, such as real-time computing and online transaction processing, further driving the best performance from flash and helping you to deliver on service level agreements (SLAs). This characteristic also enables longer distance transmission.

Why Choose ATTO Fibre Channel for your data center?

More than 25 years of innovation experience in Fibre Channel and SSD technologies
Highly specialized Fibre Channel stack with proprietary technologies that provide the lowest latency, highest amount of IOPS and best reliability
Designed with virtual environments in mind, including NPIV support, VMware vCenter plug-in and vConfigTool™ with Latency Scout™
Simplified, centralized management and monitoring for physical and virtual environments
Broad driver support for Linux, Windows, macOS®, VMware®, Illumos® and FreeBSD
Extensive list of certified, interoperable solutions with industry-leading providers of servers, workstations and flash, disk and tape storage.
Strong partner ecosystem and engineering support team for rapid deployment

Complementary end-to-end storage and network connectivity portfolio designed to work together and optimized to support mixed workloads, from workgroup to enterprise, and across multiple protocols, including Fibre Channel, Ethernet and iSCSI.

Future Outlook

Flash-based arrays with their better performance, reliability, and TCO will soon dominate primary storage environments, effectively replacing pure hard disk drive (HDD)-based environments. Factors such as overall dollars per Gb cost compared to HDD will continue to decrease for flash. This is where the other attributes of flash will allow solution architects the ability to craft an all-flash or hybrid solution depending on the cost considerations and business objectives. Furthermore, as latency continues to evolve as a key performance factor for real-time applications, the benefits of matching storage network performance with the power of flash storage will continue to be complimented and fully realized with Fibre Channel technology.