Accelerating Remote Virtual Machine Access | SNIA

Abstract

Although new non-volatile media inherently offers very low latency, remote access using protocols such as NVMe-oF and presenting the data to VMs via virtualized interfaces such as virtio adds considerable software overhead. One way to reduce the overhead is to use the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), an open-source software project that provides building blocks for scalable and efficient storage applications with breakthrough performance. Comparing the software paths for virtualizing block storage I/O illustrates the advantages of the SPDK-based approach. Empirical data shows that using SPDK can improve CPU efficiency by up to 10 x and reduce latency up to 50% over existing methods. Future enhancements for SPDK will make its advantages even greater.