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Excelero NVMesh: Network vs Storage Challenges.

NVMesh is a 100% software-only solution that enables customers to benefit from the performance of local flash with the convenience of centralized storage while avoiding proprietary hardware lock-in and reducing overall storage. It's storage architecture mainly consists of two software modules: clients and target. A client is a server that generates read and write requests, and a target is a server with storage. The NVMesh clients and targets communicate, identify valuable resources, and use those resources to run a distributed storage solution.

The primary benefit of NVMesh is that it enables true converged infrastructure by logically disaggregating storage from computers. It is designed to meet the storage requirements for applications of any scale. Its flexibility allows for both physically converged and disaggregated deployments to create a virtual, distributed non-volatile array. The RDDA of Excelero allows this true convergence.  NVMesh enables shared NVMe across any network and supports any locals or distributed file system. And today with this availability, enterprises can design Server SAN infrastructures for the most demanding enterprise and cloud-scale applications, leveraging standard servers and multiple tiers of flash.

The key challenges of NVMesh in distributed storage is that the algorithms are executed by the clients, and clients do not communicate directly with each other, agents usually communicate with each other. And the control path is a suggestion only mode to the datapath, control path runs in the background.

Networking Issues Vs Storage Issues.

Distributed storage mainly deals with communication and synchronization issues. Therefore, using the same solutions that are successfully implemented in pure storage less networking may help with this issue.  In pure networking, corner case error handling is done by a reboot mechanism and when there is no connection, the existing technical problems never grow, and it is usually auto-solved when reconnected.

In storage, however, data is expected to be persistent, so the reboot is not viable in this case, it makes the problem harder to solve. So, all the corner cases and the bugs may be addressed and hot fixed. While in pure networking they can be solved by a reboot.

Networking Vs Storage Responsibility

Responsibility is the other difference between them; each software layer is responsible for its own bug. In storage requirements, users expect 100% resiliency, when developing soft-ware defined storage, all the bugs in the software must be handled. And an error in networking will be considered as your bug as well as the customers expects maximum availability and does not pay head to who is creating the problems. While in networking, the user will usually just restart or reboot an application without blaming the protocols of the application or the provider.

These challenges between networking and storage in Excelero NVMesh of issues and responsibilities are viable to their own problems. In pure networking, customers can usually just reboot or restart their system when there is a bug or problem in the application that they are using because the providers are not responsible for the glitch. While in disturbed storage, the provider is held accountable and responsible for the problems occurred in the applications.

Author’s Bio: The author in this article has written about the difference between networking and storage challenges in Excelero NVMesh.