NVMe - SNIA on Data, Networking & Storage

Considerations and Options for NVMe/TCP Deployment

June 16, 2023June 16, 2023 David McIntyre Leave a comment

NVMe®/TCP has gained a lot of attention over the last several years due to its great performance characteristics and relatively low cost. Since its ratification in 2018, the NVMe/TCP protocol has been enhanced to add features such as Discovery Automation, Authentication and Secure Channels that make it more suitable for use in enterprise environments. Now as organizations evaluate their options and consider adopting NVMe/TCP for use in their environment, many find they need a bit more information before deciding how to move forward.

That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) is hosting a live webinar on July 19, 2023 “NVMe/TCP: Performance, Deployment and Automation” where we will provide an overview of deployment considerations and options, and answer questions such as: Read More

A Q&A on Discovery Automation for NVMe-oF IP-Based SANs

November 22, 2021November 22, 2021 Tom Friend Leave a comment

In order to fully unlock the potential of the NVMe® IP based SANs, we first need to address the manual and error prone process that is currently used to establish connectivity between NVMe Hosts and NVM subsystems. Several leading companies in the industry have joined together through NVM Express to collaborate on innovations to simplify and automate this discovery process.

This was the topic of discussion at our recent SNIA Networking Storage Forum webcast “NVMe-oF: Discovery Automation for IP-based SANs” where our experts, Erik Smith and Curtis Ballard, took a deep dive on the work that is being done to address these issues. If you missed the live event, you can watch it on demand here and get a copy of the slides. Erik and Curtis did not have time to answer all the questions during the live presentation. As promised, here are answers to them all.

Q. Is the Centralized Discovery Controller (CDC) highly available, and is this visible to the hosts? Do they see a pair of CDCs on the network and retry requests to a secondary if a primary is not available?

Automating Discovery for NVMe IP-based SANs

October 6, 2021October 6, 2021 Erik Smith 1 Comment

NVMe® IP-based SANs (including transports such as TCP, RoCE, and iWARP) have the potential to provide significant benefits in application environments ranging from the Edge to the Data Center. However, before we can fully unlock the potential of the NVMe IP-based SAN, we first need to address the manual and error prone process that is currently used to establish connectivity between NVMe Hosts and NVM subsystems. This process includes administrators explicitly configuring each Host to access the appropriate NVM subsystems in their environment. In addition, any time an NVM Subsystem interface is added or removed, a Host administrator may need to explicitly update the configuration of impacted hosts to reflect this change.

Due to the decentralized nature of this configuration process, using it to manage connectivity for more than a few Host and NVM subsystem interfaces is impractical and adds complexity when deploying an NVMe IP-based SAN in environments that require a high-degrees of automation.

Protecting NVMe over Fabrics Data from Day One, The Armored Truck Way

April 27, 2021April 27, 2021 John Kim Leave a comment

With ever increasing threat vectors both inside and outside the data center, a compromised customer dataset can quickly result in a torrent of lost business data, eroded trust, significant penalties, and potential lawsuits. Potential vulnerabilities exist at every point when scaling out NVMe® storage, which requires data to be secured every time it leaves a server or the storage media, not just when leaving the data center. NVMe over Fabrics is poised to be the one of the most dominant storage transports of the future and securing and validating the vast amounts of data that will traverse this fabric is not just prudent, but paramount.

NVMe® over Fabrics for Absolute Beginners

February 23, 2021March 25, 2021 J Metz 1 Comment

A while back I wrote an article entitled “NVMe™ for Absolute Beginners.” It seems to have resonated with a lot of people and it appears there might be a call for doing the same thing for NVMe® over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™).

This article is for absolute beginners. If you are a seasoned (or even moderately-experienced) technical person, this probably won’t be news to you. However, you are free (and encouraged!) to point people to this article who need Plain English™ to get started.

A Quick Refresher

Any time an application on a computer (or server, or even a consumer device like a phone) needs to talk to a storage device, there are a couple of things that you need to have. First, you need to have memory (like RAM), you need to have a CPU, and you also need to have something that can hold onto your data for the long haul (also called storage).

Another thing you need to have is a way for the CPU to talk to the memory device (on one hand) and the storage device (on the other). Thing is, CPUs talk a very specific language, and historically memory could speak that language, but storage could not.

NVMe Key-Value Standard Q&A

November 9, 2020November 9, 2020 John Kim Leave a comment

Last month, Bill Martin, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair, presented a detailed update on what’s happening in the development and deployment of the NVMe Key-Value standard. Bill explained where Key Value fits within an architecture, why it’s important, and the standards work that is being done between NVM Express and SNIA. The webcast was one of our highest rated. If you missed it, it’s available on-demand along with the webcast slides. Attendees at the live event had many great questions, which Bill Martin has answered here:

Q. Two of the most common KV storage mechanisms in use today are AWS S3 and RocksDB. How does NVMe KV standards align or differ from them? How difficult would it be to map between the APIs and semantics of those other technologies to NVMe KV devices?

Understanding the NVMe Key-Value Standard

August 17, 2020August 17, 2020 John Kim Leave a comment

The storage industry has many applications that rely on storing data as objects. In fact, it’s the most popular way that unstructured data—for example photos, videos, and archived messages–is accessed.

At the drive level, however, the devil is in the details. Normally, storage devices like drives or storage systems store information as blocks, not objects. This means that there is some translation that goes on between the data as it is ingested or consumed (i.e., objects) and the data that is stored (i.e., blocks).

Naturally, storing objects from applications as objects on storage would be more efficient and means that there are performance boosts, and simplicity means that there are fewer things that can go wrong. Moving towards storing key value pairs that get away from the traditional block storage paradigm makes it easier and simpler to access objects. But nobody wants a marketplace where each storage vendor has their own key value API.

Both the NVM Express™ group and SNIA have done quite a bit of work in standardizing this approach:

25 Questions (and Answers) on Ethernet-attached SSDs

April 14, 2020September 30, 2022 Ted Vojnovich Leave a comment

The SNIA Networking Storage Forum celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by hosting a live webcast, Ethernet-attached SSDs – Brilliant Idea or Storage Silliness?” Even though we didn’t serve green beer during the event, the response was impressive with hundreds of live attendees who asked many great questions – 25 to be exact. Our expert presenters have answered them all here:

Q. Has a prototype drive been built today that includes the Ethernet controller inside the NVMe SSD?

Got SPDK Questions?

January 15, 2020March 29, 2020 Tim Lustig 1 Comment

We kicked-off our 2020 webcast program by diving into how The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) fits in the NVMe landscape. Our SPDK experts, Jim Harris and Ben Walker, did an outstanding job presenting on this topic. In fact, their webcast, “Where Does SPDK Fit in the NVMe-oF Landscape” received at 4.9 rating on a scale of 1-5 from the live audience. If you missed the webcast, I highly encourage you to watch it on-demand. We had some great questions from the attendees and here are answers to them all:

Q. Which CPU architectures does SPDK support?

Hyperscalers Take on NVMe™ Cloud Storage Questions

December 2, 2019March 29, 2020 J Metz Leave a comment

Our recent webcast on how Hyperscalers, Facebook and Microsoft are working together to merge their SSD drive requirements generated a lot of interesting questions. If you missed “How Facebook & Microsoft Leverage NVMe Cloud Storage” you can watch it on-demand. As promised at our live event. Here are answers to the questions we received.

Q. How does Facebook or Microsoft see Zoned Name Spaces being used?