Datacenter SAN networks have evolved drastically over the years, Fibre Channel (FC) was introduced in 1994 to specifically manage SCSI protocol mapping and simplify the architecture of storage transport for the time. By the early 2000s, other transport options started to appear such as iSCSI for traditional hard disks and FICON for mainframe, and by the end of the decade transport options such as FCoE which unified FC and Ethernet traffic were adopted.
As faster flash storage started to appear in the storage world, many technology adopters were not getting the envisioned performance due to protocol bottlenecks. By 2013, Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) was designed to show how NVMe can replace traditional SCSI commands with a leaner command set to improve overhead and performance.
By 2016, the industry began designing the transport mechanism for how to transport this leaner NVMe command set, leading to the introduction of NVMe-OF transport protocols.
As a premier enterprise storage vendor, Hitachi Vantara provides support for these NVMe-OF protocols in our latest Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One Block systems in the form of 64Gb NVMe-FC and 100G NVMe/TCP, giving our customers the flexibility to choose how to design and implement their SAN networks based on business and ROI needs. Furthermore, as Hitachi Vantara partners with Cisco to provide a scalable and robust solution with UCS-X, Cisco Nexus, and Hitachi VSP One Block, additional development efforts aim to provide native Hitachi VSP features within Cisco Intersight to enable customers the ease and flexibility to holistically manage their compute, network, and storage all via Intersight. The latest enhancements enable configuration of NVMe-OF logical resources such as NVM sub-system, namespace, and path creation, as well as all inverse operations. Below is the full list of Hitachi VSP tasks for NVMe-OF management.