Storage vendors are pushing technologies like flash and Non-Volatile Memory Express, or NVMe, over fabric to meet the demands of modern workloads. But the very best storage can’t whiz through a sluggish, traffic-jammed network. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is incorporating Mellanox Technologies Ltd’s Spectrum Ethernet Fabric Solution into its StoreFabric M-series switches to clear network arteries for data-heavy applications.

“You’ve got a virtualized, containerized world that’s using massive amounts of data on super-fast storage media, and it needs the network to support that,” said Marty Lans (pictured, left), senior director and general manager, storage engineering, connectivity and global interoperability at HPE.

Lans joined Kevin Deierling (pictured, right), vice president of marketing at Mellanox, for a special interview at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

The companies set out to burst the network bottleneck preventing NVMe over fabric and other storage protocols from hitting peak speeds in action. “This faster storage needs faster networks,” Deierling said.

The Storage Area Network, or SAN, relied on Fibre Channel — high-speed network technology — to transmit data, but there is no Fibre Channel in the cloud. The new ideal is Ethernet, which offers the best performance, reliability and “storage intelligence” now available, according to Deierling. “We can get three times the performance for one-third the price,” he said.

Microseconds countdown to zero latency

Ethernet is optimized for the latest storage protocols. The pace at which modern applications need to crunch data is fueling a race toward infinitesimal latency, Deierling explained.

“Everything is built in in terms of all of the new protocols like NVMe over Fabrics, which is a new one that’s coming. Obviously iSCSI. And taking some of the things that we do in terms of intelligence, like RDMA, which is RoCE over Ethernet, that’s what really enables NVMe,” he said.

HPE has made its StoreFabric M-series switches user friendly with automation and orchestration similar to those in its it Fibre Channel solution Smart SAN, Lans pointed out. “It gives you the ability to do all the nuances of what makes Ethernet hard — automate and orchestrate all of the Ethernet capabilities to behave much like a Fiber Channel network,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below. (* Disclosure: Mellanox Technologies Ltd. sponsored this segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Mellanox nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE