Storage shake up: How Tecala’s NVMe on-demand is redefining cloud performance

Imagine performing data-intensive tasks in three days instead of 30. Many existing storage platforms struggle with the demands on modern data processing, that’s why our Tecala cloud now offers all customers high-performance NVMe as a cloud service.

Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) significantly reduces storage I/O (read and write from disc) by using the server’s PCI interface instead of a traditional controller like SATA or SAS.

End the storage performance tax

Enter the multi-lane storage highway with NVMe on demand. First-generation flash was connected via a general interface (system bus) and requests had to come in sequentially (one after another) and that was limited to 6Gbps.

With next generation NVMe you get “thousands of lanes of traffic” and much faster storage.

While some cloud and hosting providers limit storage and I/O, all Tecala cloud customers receive uncapped access to NVMe. We won’t limit storage performance based on capacity meaning you’ll benefit from faster performing applications to drive your business efficiencies and reduce costs.

Some clouds talk about response times of between four to seven milliseconds, whereas Tecala is sub-millisecond since we don’t cap any sort of performance for flash. Similarly, with I/O requests, these can be limited based on how much storage is consumed. We don’t limit any of the I/O requests, just use as much as you want to use.

Uncapped access to NVMe is here to take your business to the next level.

This is one of our main differentiators, especially compared with public cloud – customers get performance based on the amount of capacity provisioned (can be 20GB or 1000GB) without any artificial restrictions.

The only application NVMe is not typically used for is archiving due to cost. That said, it is possible to include NVMe in a tiered archiving architecture where write requests for an archive are written very fast and then they get tiered down to a lower form of storage in a timeframe that’s appropriate.

The app and business benefits

What types of applications are well suited for NVMe storage? Any application will run better on NVMe when it historically ran on SAS or SATA, and user experiences and reporting process should speed up drastically.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re running a virtual desktop environment or you’re doing data warehousing, your requests and your time to actually complete a process and deliver a great user experience is all improved by running on NVMe.

There is no “this is a workload that must be run on NVMe” — it’s just a case that anything that runs on NVMe is going to perform better than what it does on the other types of mediums. And this is better for many business applications.

The main blocker for NVMe uptake is it is easier, and cheaper, to expand a legacy environment than move to next-generation storage.

Without the upfront capital to purchase NVMe systems many organisations expand existing systems or move to public cloud, which won’t necessarily deliver performance they would get with NVMe.

Finding the right MSP for your business will ensure that you have access to the benefits of the latest technology, such as NVMe, without the high capital costs.

Our pay-as-you-go model is designed to make global enterprise technology expertise and performance accessible to the mid-market.

Tecala cloud customers can get NVMe on demand alongside a lower tier of storage. By default, we provide NVMe, but we don’t take away the option of a lower storage tier.

It is important to review what a vendor offers as part of any tiered storage service.

A “Tier 0” with one vendor might claim to be “all flash” yet be based on SATA SSD, which is slower and is bottlenecked by I/O requests coming in sequentially. Whereas Tecala’s top tier is all NVMe-based.

Speak to a Tecala specialist today to book your Technology Capabilities Assessment and learn about the business benefits of NVMe delivered by an MSP.