Abstract

IDC Innovators are emerging vendors with revenue <$100 million that have demonstrated either a groundbreaking business model or an innovative new technology — or both. This IDC Innovators study reviews three vendors, Lightbits Labs, Excelero, and Pavilion Data, calling out the differentiation that their approach (and their products) provides to potential customers. As digital transformation drives the need for higher storage performance, more customers are looking at NVMe and related technologies. When customers can deploy a shared storage solution that delivers the same latencies as local storage, there is a strong preference for it. This is because a shared storage environment offers easier scaling, higher capacity, better capacity utilization, and access to the types of enterprise-class data services typically only available in SAN-based solutions. For the most latency-sensitive customers, these shared storage solutions will be connected over an NVMe over Fabrics host connection. NVMe/TCP, a variant of this that is just starting to become available, will ultimately dominate the NVMe over Fabrics market because of several distinct advantages that are discussed in this document.

"Ease of management, simplified maintenance, and lower cost are the key advantages that will drive NVMe/TCP deployments in both enterprises and cloud service providers," said Eric Burgener, research vice president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms, and Technologies. "This technology is just starting to become available now, but IDC expects to see very rapid adoption of it over the next two to three years."

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