Est. Reading Time: 12 Mins Prereq: Storage Fundamentals
Architectural Track // Modern Infra 04

Enterprise Storage & SDS

Tagline: Decoupling the Data Layer.

Strategic engineering for modern storage fabrics. Focus: NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF), Software-Defined Storage (SDS) logic, and optimizing high-performance block storage.

High Performance

Level 100: NVMe-oF Logic

  • Protocol Shifts: Moving from iSCSI/FC to NVMe over TCP/RDMA.
  • Latency Reduction: Eliminating the SCSI bottleneck for all-flash arrays.
  • Parallelism: Maximizing queue depth for modern multi-core hosts.

Architect’s Verdict: The medium has changed. NVMe is not just a drive; it is the new language of storage performance.

Abstraction

Level 200: Software-Defined Logic

  • Commodity Hardware: Building storage clusters from standard X86 servers.
  • Distributed Planes: Decoupling the control plane from the data plane.
  • Data Locality: Ensuring compute and storage proximity for HCI.

Architect’s Verdict: SDS turns storage into an application. Software agility meets hardware speed.

Modern Fabric

Level 300: Unified Data Mesh

  • Hybrid Cloud Tiering: Automated movement of cold data to object storage.
  • Global Namespace: Bridging on-prem and cloud storage into a single view.
  • Predictive Analytics: AI-driven performance tuning and failure prediction.

Architect’s Verdict: The goal of a modern fabric is to make data location irrelevant to the end application.