Going Remote at Low Latency: A Future Networked NVM Ecosystem

As new ultra-low latency storage such as Persistent Memory and NVM is deployed, it becomes necessary to provide remote access - for replication, availability and resiliency to errors. The SNIA NVM TWG has been exploring these technologies and has published white papers outlining requirements for remotely utilizing such devices. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), arbitrated by file and block storage protocols, is a clear choice for this access, but existing RDMA and storage protocol implementations incur latency overheads which impact the performance of the solution, and lack certain semantics necessary to ensure durability by a remote peer. At last Fall’s Storage Developer’s Conference, a path-finding effort for reducing these latencies and providing new semantics was described. This talk picks up where that left off and will introduce a concrete proposal, outlining some of its potential benefits.