At this year’s VMworld in Barcelona, Dell EMC and VMware demonstrated how PowerMax can achieve game changing storage performance across virtualized environments. The demo showcased industry first technology and how Dell EMC will help users transition from today to tomorrow while protecting their current storage investments.

The technology of that tomorrow is NVMe over Fibre Channel (NVMeoF) and Storage Class Memory (SCM). Both are designed to be the next generation of I/O protocols and persistent flash media delivering extreme levels of storage performance. Use cases include new real-time and data-intensive analytic applications that demand ultra low latency, massive IOPS, and ginormous bandwidth. They also include super-charging today’s  OLTP and database workloads to speed transactions and reduce processing times.

And here’s why the combination of NVMe networks with SCM drives are a game changer.

NVMe over Fabric does lots of cool things to take full advantage of Flash Arrays. It’s designed for extensive parallelism, concurrency and scalability to unlock the power of today’s multi-core CPU controllers and high-speed media. It provides end-to-end I/O optimizations, massive que depths, and lower latencies from the NVMe host bus adapters (HBAs) to PowerMax NVMe drives. It all adds to delivering users to more application transactions with lower response times. And because we can leverage SAN networks, we can help protect your infrastructure investments.

Storage Class Memory represents the future of low latency persistent storage media. The performance of SCM is measured in tens of microseconds. That’s less than 1/100 of a millisecond. It’s wicked fast and approaches the performance levels of DRAM, but at a lower cost and higher density. The benefit to users is the ability to provide “in memory” like performance with consistent, predictable I/O latencies.

The ability to leverage the benefits of NVMe and SCM requires the right storage architecture. PowerMax is the world’s only Flash Array that includes an innovative, proven real-time machine learning engine that provides intelligent data placement. This intelligence optimizes NVMe and SCM performance without introducing management overhead. PowerMax allows users to transparently leverage both SCM technology for their highest priority, lowest latency workloads combined with cost efficient NVMe flash drives for their less active data sets.

This differentiating capability is essential to helping IT organizations increase application performance, reduce storage costs, and minimize management complexity.

Special shout out to @jcelona1, @drewtonnesen, and @chhandomay for developing  the demo (aka the real work).