The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) has gained industry-wide recognition as a framework for building highly performant and efficient storage software with a focus on NVMe™. This includes software drivers and libraries for building NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) host and target solutions. On January 9, 2020, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum is going to kick-off its 2020 webcast program by diving into this topic with a live webcast “Where Does SPDK Fit in the NVMe-oF Landscape.”
Category: NVMe
How Facebook & Microsoft Leverage NVMe™ Cloud Storage
What do Hyperscalers like Facebook and Microsoft have in common? Find out in our next SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast, How Facebook and Microsoft Leverage NVMe Cloud Storage, on November 19, 2019 where you’ll hear how these cloud market leaders are using NVMe SSDs in their architectures.
Our expert presenters, Ross Stenfort, Hardware System Engineer at Facebook and Lee Prewitt, Principal Hardware Program Manager, Azure CSI at Microsoft, will provide a close up look into their application requirements and challenges, why they chose NVMe flash for storage, and how they are successfully deploying NVMe to fuel their businesses. You’ll learn:
- IOPs requirements for Hyperscalers
- Challenges when managing at scale
- Issues around form factors
- Need to allow for “rot in place”
- Remote debugging requirements
- Security needs
- Deployment success factors
I hope you will join us for this look at NVMe in the real world. Our experts will be on-hand to answer your questions during and after the webcast. Register today. We look forward to seeing you on November 19th.
Author of NVMe™/TCP Spec Answers Your Questions
900 people have already watched our SNIA Networking Storage Forum webcast, What NVMe™/TCP Means for Networked Storage? where Sagi Grimberg, lead author of the NVMe/TCP specification, and J Metz, Board Member for SNIA, explained what NVMe/TCP is all about. If you haven’t seen the webcast yet, check it out on-demand.
Like any new technology, there’s no shortage of areas for potential confusion or questions. In this FAQ blog, we try to clear up both.
Q. Who is responsible for updating NVMe Host Driver?
A. We assume you are referring to the Linux host driver (independent OS software vendors are responsible for developing their own drivers). Like any device driver and/or subsystem in Linux, the responsibility of maintenance is on the maintainer(s) listed under the MAINTAINERS file. The responsibility of contributing is shared by all the community members.
Q. What is the realistic timeframe to see a commercially available NVME over TCP driver for targets? Is one year from now (2020) fair? Read More
Scale-Out File Systems FAQ
On February 28th, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) took at look at what’s happening in Scale-Out File Systems. We discussed general principles, design considerations, challenges, benchmarks and more. If you missed the live webcast, it’s now available on-demand. We did not have time to answer all the questions we received at the live event, so here are answers to them all.
Q. Can scale-out file systems do Erasure coding?
A. Indeed, Erasure coding is a common method to improve resilience.
Q. How does one address the problem of a specific disk going down? Where does scale-out architecture provide redundancy?
A. Disk failures typically are covered by RAID software. Some of scale-out software also use multiple replicators to mitigate the impact of disk failures.
Q. Are there use cases where a hybrid of these two styles is needed?
A. Yes, for example, in some environments, the foundation layer might be using the dedicated storage server to form the large storage pool, which is the 1st style, and then export LUNs or virtual disks to the compute nodes (either physical or virtual) to run the applications, which is the 2nd style.
Q. Which scale-out file systems present on windows, Linux platforms?
A. Some of the scale-out file systems provide native client software across multiple platforms. Another approach is to use Samba to build SMB gateways to make the scale-out file system available to Windows computers.
Q. Is Amazon elastic file system (EFS) on AWS scale-out file systems?
A. Please see:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/performance.html
“Amazon EFS file systems are distributed across an unconstrained number of storage servers, enabling file systems to grow elastically to petabyte scale and allowing massively parallel access from Amazon EC2 instances to your data. The distributed design of Amazon EFS avoids the bottlenecks and constraints inherent to traditional file servers.”
Q. Where are the most cost effective price/performance uses of NVMe?
A. NVMe can support very high IOPS and very high throughput as well. The best use case would be to couple NVMe with high performance storage software that would not limit the NVMe.
When NVMe™ over Fabrics Meets TCP
In the storage world, NVMe™ is arguably the hottest thing going right now. Go to any storage conference – either vendor-related or vendor-neutral, and you’ll see NVMe as the latest and greatest innovation. It stands to reason, then, that when you want to run NVMe over a network, you must understand NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). Meanwhile, TCP is by far the most popular networking transport protocol both for storage and non-storage traffic.
TCP – the long-standing mainstay of networking – is the newest transport technology to be approved by the NVM Express ® organization, enabling NVMe/TCP. This can mean really good things for storage and storage networking – but what are the tradeoffs?
With any new technology, though, there can still be a bit of confusion. No technology is a panacea; and with any new development there will always be a need to gauge where it is best used (like a tool in a toolbox).
Learn more on January 22nd when the SNIA Networking Storage Forum hosts a live webcast, What NVMe™/TCP Means for Networked Storage. In this webcast, we’ve brought together the lead author of the NVMe/TCP specification, Sagi Grimberg, and J. Metz, member of the SNIA and NVMe Boards of Directors, to discuss:
- What is NVMe/TCP
- How NVMe/TCP works
- What are the trade-offs?
- What should network administrators know?
- What kind of expectations are realistic?
- What technologies can make NVMe/TCP work better?
- And more…
Obviously, we can’t cover the entire world of NVMe and TCP networking in an hour, but we can start to raise the questions – and approach the answers – that must be addressed in order to make informed decisions. Speaking of questions, bring yours. Sagi and J. will be answering them on the 22nd. Register today to save your spot.
Introducing the Networking Storage Forum
At SNIA, we are dedicated to staying on top of storage trends and technologies to fulfill our mission as a 
globally recognized and trusted authority for storage leadership, standards, and technology expertise. For the last several years, the Ethernet Storage Forum has been working hard to provide high quality educational and informational material related to all kinds of storage.
From our “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” series, to the absolutely phenomenal (and required viewing) “Storage Performance Benchmarking” series to the “Great Storage Debates” series, we’ve produced dozens of hours of material.
Technologies have evolved and we’ve come to a point where there’s a need to understand how these systems and architectures work – beyond just the type of wire that is used. Today, there are new systems that are bringing storage to completely new audiences. From scale-up to scale-out, from disaggregated to hyperconverged, RDMA, and NVMe-oF – there is more to storage networking than just your favorite transport.
For example, when we talk about NVMe™ over Fabrics, the protocol is broader than just one way of accomplishing what you need. When we talk about virtualized environments, we need to examine the nature of the relationship between hypervisors and all kinds of networks. When we look at “Storage as a Service,” we need to understand how we can create workable systems from all the tools at our disposal.
Bigger Than Our Britches
As I said, SNIA’s Ethernet Storage Forum has been working to bring these new technologies to the forefront, so that you can see (and understand) the bigger picture. To that end, we realized that we needed to rethink the way that our charter worked, to be even more inclusive of technologies that were relevant to storage and networking.
So…
Introducing the Networking Storage Forum. In this group we’re going to continue producing top-quality, vendor-neutral material related to storage networking solutions. We’ll be talking about:
- Storage Protocols (iSCSI, FC, FCoE, NFS, SMB, NVMe-oF, etc.)
- Architectures (Hyperconvergence, Virtualization, Storage as a Service, etc.)
- Storage Best Practices
- New and developing technologies
… and more!
Generally speaking, we’ll continue to do the same great work that we’ve been doing, but now our name more accurately reflects the breadth of work that we do.
We’re excited to launch this new chapter of the Forum. If you work for a vendor, are a systems integrator, university or someone who manages storage, we welcome you to join the NSF. We are an active group that honestly has a lot of fun. If you’re one of our loyal followers, we hope you will continue to keep track of what we’re doing. And if you’re new to this Forum, we encourage you to take advantage of the library of webcasts, white papers, and published articles that we have produced here. There’s a wealth of un-biased, educational information there, we don’t think you’ll find anywhere else!
If there’s something that you’d like to hear about – let us know! We are always looking to hear about headaches, concerns, and areas of confusion within the industry where we can shed some light. Stay current with all things NSF:
- Visit: snia.org/nsf
- Follow: @SNIANSF
- Subscribe: sniansfblog.org
- Watch: SNIAVideo Network Storage Playlist
Storage Controllers – Your Questions Answered
The term controller is used constantly, but often has very different meanings. When you have a controller that manages hardware, there are very different requirements than a controller that manages an entire system-wide control plane. You can even have controllers managing other controllers. It can all get pretty confusing very quickly. That’s why the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) hosted our 9th “Too Proud to Ask” webcast. This time it was “Everything You Wanted to Know about Storage but were Too Proud to Ask: Part Aqua – Storage Controllers.” Our experts from Microsemi, Cavium, Mellanox and Cisco did a great job explaining the differences between the many types of controllers, but of course there were still questions. Here are answers to all that we received during the live event which you can now view on-demand.
Q.Is there a standard for things such as NVMe over TCP/IP?
A. NVMe™ is in the process of standardizing a TCP transport. It will be called NVMe over TCP (NVMe™/TCP) and the technical proposal should be completed and public later in 2018.
Q. What are the length limits on NVMe over fibre?
A. There are no length limits. Multiple Fibre Channel frames can be combined to create any length transfer needed. The Fibre Channel Industry Association has a very good presentation on Long-Distance Fibre Channel, which you can view here.
Q. What does the term “Fabrics” mean in the storage context?
A. Fabrics typically applies to the switch or switches interconnecting the hosts and storage devices. Specifically, a storage “fabric” maintains some knowledge about itself and the devices that are connected to it, but some people use it to mean any networked devices that provide storage. In this context, “Fabrics” is also shorthand for “NVMe over Fabrics,” which refers to the ability to run the NVMe protocol over an agnostic networking transport, such as RDMA-based Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand (TCP/IP coming soon).
Q. How does DMA result in lower power consumption?
A. DMA is typically done using a harder DMA engine on the controller. This offloads the transfer from the host CPU which is typically higher power than the logic of the DMA engine.
Q. How does the latency of NVMe over Fibre compare to NVMe over PCIe?
A. The overall goal of having NVMe transported over any fabric is not to exceed 20us of latency above and beyond a PCIe-based NVMe solution. Having said that, there are many aspects of networked storage that can affect latency, including number of hops, topology size, oversubscription ratios, and cut-through/store-and-forward switching. Individual latency metrics are published by specific vendors. We recommend you contact your favorite Fibre Channel vendor for their numbers.
Q. Which of these technologies will grow and prevail over the next 5-10 years…
A. That is the $64,000 question, isn’t it? J The basic premise of this presentation was to help illuminate what controllers are, and the different types that exist within a storage environment. No matter what specific flavor becomes the most popular, these basic tenets will remain in effect for the foreseeable future.
Q. I am new to Storage matters, but I have been an IT tech for almost 10 years. Can you explain Block vs. File IO?
A. We’re glad you asked! We highly recommend you take a look at another one of our webinars, Block vs. File vs. Object Storage, which covers that very subject!
If you have an idea for another topic you’re “Too Proud to Ask” about, let us know by commenting in this blog.
The Alphabet Soup of Storage Networking Acronyms Explained
At our most recent webcast, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Part Turquoise – Where Does My Data Go?, our panel of experts dove into what really happens when you hit “save” and send your data off. It was an alphabet soup of acronyms as they explained the nuances of and the differences between: Read More
Q&A – When Compute, Networking and Storage Intersect
In Part Vermillion of our SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” webcast series – we examined the terms and concepts are at the heart of where compute, networking and storage intersect. That’s why we called it “What if Programming and Networking Had a Storage Baby” If you missed the live webcast, you can watch it on-demand.
The discussion from our panel of experts generated a lot of good questions. As promised, here are answers to them all. Read More
The Too Proud to Ask Train Makes Another Stop: Where Does My Data Go?
By now, we at the SNIA Storage Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) hope you are familiar with (perhaps even a loyal fan of) the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask,” popular webcast series. On August 1st, the “Too Proud to Ask” train will make another stop. In this seventh session, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Turquoise – Where Does My Data Go?, we will take a look into the mysticism and magic of what happens when you send your data off into the wilderness. Once you click “save,” for example, where does it actually go?
When we start to dig deeper beyond the application layer, we often don’t understand what happens behind the scenes. It’s important to understand multiple aspects of the type of storage our data goes to along with their associated benefits and drawbacks as well as some of the protocols used to transport it.
In this webcast we will explain:
- Volatile v Non-Volatile v Persistent Memory
- NVDIMM v RAM v DRAM v SLC v MLC v TLC v NAND v 3D NAND v Flash v SSDs v NVMe
- NVMe (the protocol)
Many people get nervous when they see that many acronyms, but all too often they come up in conversation, and you’re expected to know all of them? Worse, you’re expected to know the differences between them, and the consequences of using them? Even worse, you’re expected to know what happens when you use the wrong one?
We’re here to help.
It’s an ambitious project, but these terms and concepts are at the heart of where compute, networking and storage intersect. Having a good grasp of these concepts ties in with which type of storage networking to use, and how data is actually stored behind the scenes.
Register today to join us for this edition of the “Too Proud To Ask” series, as we work towards making you feel more comfortable in the strange, mystical world of storage. And don’t let pride get in the way of asking any and all questions on this great topic. We will be there on August 1st to answer them!
Update: If you missed the live event, it’s now available on-demand. You can also download the webcast slides.