A really bad idea

I recently attended a very interesting webcast organized by G2M Research about NVMe/TCP with Excelero, Lightbits Labs and WekaIO. I was surprised by G2M introducing a new acronym SOFS for Scale-Out Flash Storage. Having an acronym is good idea but it has to be a new one. What a real bad idea as the FS letters in our storage industry mean file system or file storage for decades. Some vendors even use this acronym associated with their product for scale out file system/storage again. Using SOFS to support flash storage is just bad. And last point this webcast said that SOFS is outside of SDS which is just wrong as well.

So what is SOFS? in fact, it is storage entities (storage servers/nodes, storage array) connected to compute servers via NVMe over Fabrics, here during this presentation via TCP. It reminds us the FC SAN model where FC is replaced by Ethernet, but it could be FC as well, and SAN name dropped in favor of a classic network approach. The implicit interface here is block.

This is what we call often a disaggregated model where the compute layer is disconnected from the storage layer and all nodes are connected to all storage entities. The industry also couples this mode with share-everything concept meaning that all compute nodes are physically connected with all storage entires and can be logically segmented of course. Composable architecture is also well associated with this approach. Disaggregated means more top-down mode and composable a bottom-up. Again block is implicitly here so why no just continue to use SDS Block, it's largely enough.