Tag: NVMe

NVMe®/TCP Q&A

Erik Smith Leave a comment

The SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) had an outstanding response to our live webinar, “NVMe/TCP: Performance, Deployment, and Automation.” If you missed the session, you can watch it on-demand and download a copy of the presentation slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Our live audience gave the presentation a 4.9 rating on a scale of 1-5, and they asked a lot of detailed questions, which our presenter, Erik Smith, Vice Chair of SNIA NSF, has answered here.

Q: Does the Centralized Discovery Controller (CDC) layer also provide drive access control or is it simply for discovery of drives visible on the network?

A: As defined in TP8010, the CDC only provides transport layer discovery. In other words, the CDC will allow a host to discover transport layer information (IP, Port, NQN) about the subsystem ports (on the array) that each host has been allowed to communicate with. Provisioning storage volumes to a particular host is additional functionality that COULD be added to an implementation of the CDC. (e.g., Dell has a CDC implementation that we refer to as SmartFabric Storage Software (SFSS).

Q: Can you provide some examples of companies that provide CDC and drive access control functionalities? Read More

Object Storage: Got Questions?

Christine McMonigal Leave a comment

Over 900 people (and counting) have watched our SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast, “Object Storage: Trends, Use Cases” where our expert panelist had a lively discussion on object storage characteristics, use cases and performance acceleration. If you have not seen this session yet, we encourage you to check it out on-demand. The conversation included several interesting questions related to object storage. As promised, here are answers to them:

Q: Today object storage allows many new capabilities but also new challenges, such as the need for geographic and local load balancers in a distributed scale out infrastructure that at the same time do not become the bottleneck of the object services at an unsustainable cost. Are there any solutions available today that have these features built in?

A: Some object storage solutions have features such as load balancing and geographic distribution built into the software, though often the storage administrator must manually configure parts of these features at the network and/or server level. Most object storage cloud (StaaS) implementations include a distributed, scale-out infrastructure (including load balancing) in their implementation.

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

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?

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Automating Discovery for NVMe IP-based SANs

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.

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NVMe Key-Value Standard Q&A

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?

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25 Questions (and Answers) on Ethernet-attached SSDs

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?

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Got SPDK Questions?

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?

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Hyperscalers Take on NVMe™ Cloud Storage Questions

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?

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Author of NVMe™/TCP Spec Answers Your Questions

J Metz Leave a comment

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

John Kim Leave a comment

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.