Data-driven online businesses require greater performance and capacity. To ensure high performance and add more capacity, NVMe drives have been introduced by numerous storage providers. The introduction of the new storage devices made many entrepreneurs ask themselves What is NVMe hosting? and Do I need to upgrade to NVMe? Before application owners decide to move to NVMe hosting, they need to know what NVMe stands for and what benefits it has. So, in this article, we look into how NVMe-based hosting works as well as why it’s worth implementing.
What is NVMe SSD hosting?
NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express. NVMe is an interface that helps transmit data between computers (hosts) and storage devices over the PCI Express (PCIe) bus. PCIe serves as an alternative to SATA and SAS interfaces to ensure maximum performance of NVMe. In other words, NVMe is a way to access non-volatile memory, a memory that holds data even if there is a power shutdown.
How NVMe protocol works
Over the PCIe interface, NVMe transmits input/output (I/O) commands and responses to shared memory in a host machine. The technology supports parallel I/O with multicore processors to ensure high throughput as well as mitigate CPU (central processing unit) bottlenecks. In other words, NVMe uses a faster command set in order to process input/output requests than SATA or SAS interface uses. Hence, the new protocol can interact with CPU in a more efficient way, much more efficient than the legacy protocols. Compare:
Having discussed what is NVMe and how NVMe hosting works, let’s look at its stunning benefits.
NVMe hosting advantages: Why go for it?
The predecessors of NVMe definitely lag behind. NVMe has unrivaled metrics and characteristics that no other drive in the market has so far.
NVMe provides unrivaled speeds
The new storage devices have a competitive advantage which is seen in the speed of data processing. Modern server SATA SSDs have the read speed of up to 550 MB per second. Their write speed is 520 MB per second. But NVMe SSD, on the other hand, has a whopping read speed of 6200 MB per second and the write speed of 2900 MB per second. NVMe can deliver even faster speeds than these in the long run.
NVMe is better than traditional hosting
HDD drives do have limitations as far as data access goes. These limitations relate to the rotational latency of the spinning platter and the seek time necessary for the read/write head to find the required data on the disk. With HDD drives, the data is randomly stored on rotating disks. To get access to the necessary information, the actuator arm with the read and write head must physically move to find the stored data on the platter. This process is time-consuming. That’s why users see that the page is still loading.
SSD has no moving parts, hence, it doesn’t rely on spinning platters. It leverages solid construction microchips instead. The SATA lanes, however, make data transfer slow. Even though SSDs are faster than HDDs, SATA prevents data from being transferred fast.
Here comes NVMe which has neither moving parts nor SATA. To transfer data to and from CPU, NVMe SSD drives utilize high-speed PCIe lanes, meaning NVMe can access information instantly and simultaneously. There’s no need for the data to be structured in some specific order. NVMe chooses segments of data it requires and serves them accordingly which makes NVMe hosting much faster than traditional hosting. So the load times of websites become super fast, making the navigation experience seamless for the end user.
NVMe ensures high performance
Due to its architecture, NVMe can provide a high level of performance. This performance largely depends on the queue management which NVMe deals with. Apart from older interfaces, NVMe is capable of supporting over 65,000 input/output (I/O) queues respectively. Each of these queues has over 65,000 entries. This is much more than with the older interfaces. In other words, legacy interfaces have to work with one block of data at a time whereas NVMe drives select and work with as much as 65,000 data blocks.
NVMe saves energy
The perfect combination is when the drive can deliver high performance and consume less energy. NVMe is the dream-come-true technology. Since MNVe provides smart queueing and allocates workload efficiently, it’s possible for the drives to use a low-power standby mode, reducing the consumption of energy. When NVMe drives are idle, they can save up to 97% of the power. Cost-wise, NVMe consumes less power than other solutions which simultaneously reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for web enterprises.
Meet new data demands with NVMe and accelerate your business
Enterprises are looking for high performance as far as storage media go. The amounts of data generated can be vast, especially so with the latest technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), or Blockchain. In search of a high performant computing environment, NVMe drives can be the go-to tool to meet the new data demands. NVMe can analyze, store, and process data in a way unseen before.
Maximum returns can be yielded if the NVMe infrastructure is established within the ecosystem of an enterprise. Unlike SAS or SATA, NVMe consumes very few CPU cycles making the new interface perfect for IoT processing and machine learning. With Non-Volatile Memory Express, data is processed, analyzed, and returned at a higher computing rate.
Time-sensitive requirements for modern computing environments push data centers to implement NVMe enabled storage media. Apart from this, platforms that need to handle high workloads can utilize NVMe to make data-driven decisions since all the workload is handled by the technology.
More than that, NVMe can be an asset in the automobile industry, communication spheres, medical field, gaming, entertainment, and many other areas.
As NVMe technology matures, costs decline, and storage performance requirements rise, enterprises will move toward flash-based storage systems that implement NVMe end-to-end and can support mixed workloads
Keep up with the NVMe technology and be the market leader
NVMe offers a fundamentally different approach to hosting, unlike any other protocols created before. Consumers and vendors are highly interested in the new NVMe. It is forecast that the new storage interface will take the market by storm in the next few years. NVMe can become a game changer due to its incredible performance, low latency, and availability for all platforms.
If you’ve found yourself in these lines; if you want your website to be highly responsive and visible to the search engines, we can offer NVMe hosting to you! Feel free to contact us and receive the hosting solution your website deserves.