If your business deals with hot data, high-speed data transfer is essential for you, for example if you provide video editing services online. The same case applies to businesses that deal with high-performance computing. Such businesses can be found in industries such as oil and gas as well as financial services Without high-speed data transfer, you’ll have to endure huge latency, which will make it impractical to deploy to the cloud.
High-speed transfer can be implemented with NVMe block storage, which can be set up for you by a data storage solutions company. But before we get into that, let’s look at why you can’t afford to stay locked out of the cloud.
Benefits of the Cloud
If you are unable to deploy to the cloud, then you miss out on many advantages, chief of them being scalability and cost-effectiveness.
Cost-Effectiveness
Setting up in the cloud provides easier access to data, saving time and money when starting projects. It also eliminates in-house costs related to data storage and security. Once you migrate to the cloud, the responsibility of keeping your data safe falls on the cloud provider, and since they have much to lose if a data breach occurs, they dedicate significant resources to security.
You also don’t have to set up a private data center, which can be costly. Another advantage of the cloud when it comes to cost-effectiveness is the pay-as-you-go model that most cloud providers use. You don’t pay for something unless you are using it.
Upward and Downward Scalability
For any business, the ability to scale is crucial. Scaling usually comes with challenges, which can make or break the business. The cloud helps scale without much hassle. To start with, the cloud can accommodate fluctuating technological needs, and features such as the pay-as-you-go model go a long way. With the cloud, you can also scale downward without wasting resources. On the other hand, when business is going well, you can easily increase your usage of resources.
Other benefits of the cloud include improved security, better collaboration, and higher performance, all of which contribute to a competitive edge. In addition, backup plans are rendered unnecessary.
With all these benefits, it would be a pity if your business couldn’t move to the cloud because you have data-intensive applications. The good news is, there is a solution.
Achieving High Cloud Speeds with NVMe Block Storage
Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a protocol used to achieve high data transfer speeds over PCIe connection to high-speed SSD storage. NVMe storage takes advantage of the fast read-and-write speeds made possible by SSD storage and the high data transfer throughput made possible by the PCIe interface.
In other words, instead of having your computer take more than a minute to power up, it starts super fast. Also, applications launch almost instantaneously on a device using NVMe.
When using one computer, the benefits of NVMe storage are significant. However, on a network, these benefits disappear because the properties of the network are also at play. Such properties include the network protocol being used and the bandwidth available.
But there’s a way to get these speed benefits at the network level: setting up NVMe block storage. This is done through Software-Defined Storage. The underlying hardware is abstracted and all connected storage appears as a block. Random Direct Memory Access (RDMA) can then be used to access storage without going through the CPU.
The result of all this is a low-latency, high-throughput setup which can be used with hot data and for high-performance computing applications like training machine learning models.
Conclusion
With traditional data transfer methods, running data-intensive applications on the cloud is a bad idea. Businesses that have tried it in the past always end up reverting to on-premise and private cloud solutions.
However, you don’t have to miss out on all the advantages of using the cloud. The solution lies in high-performance storage and data transfer, which can easily be implemented by a data storage solutions company.
