Benefits of NVMe Over Fabrics and Demonstration of a Prototype

NVMe offers a faster way to connect to solid state storage than traditional SAS and SATA interfaces, which were designed for spinning disk. It eliminates the SCSI layer and supports better bandwidth, IOPS, and latency than 12Gb SAS. However, traditional NVMe keeps the storage devices “captive” within the server or storage box and does not scale across distance, multiple storage nodes, or hundreds of PCIe devices. NVM Express, Inc. has proposed a standard to support remote access of NVMe devices across high speed, low-latency fabrics. Mellanox will present examples and prototype performance results of running the forthcoming standard over RDMA interconnects such as InfiniBand and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet).

Learning Objectives

Understand the benefits of NVMe over SAS or SATA interfaces.
Learn how NVMe works with RDMA on InfiniBand or RoCE fabrics.
See test results from an NVMe Over Fabrics prototypes involving NVMe flash devices
Understand how NVMe Over Fabrics works with 100Gb Ethernet