Growth of the iSCSI RDMA (iSER) Ecosystem

iSCSI RDMA (iSER) has been the fastest available block storage protocol for several years but the number of commercially available storage targets has previously limited. Now new storage solutions from vendors such as NetApp are supporting iSER, along with iSER initiators in new environments such as FreeBSD. This makes it easier for both cloud service providers and enterprises to deploy iSER. In addition, improvements to the iSER and Linux SCSI layers allow faster iSER performance than before over both InfiniBand and 40Gb Ethernet links.

Learning Objectives

Understand similarities and differences between iSER and standard iSCSI over TCP
See the growth of the iSER ecosystem for both storage target and initiator support
Learn about new features supported in iSER including T10-DIF, initiator/target discovery over RDMA, and performance optimization.
See benchmark results from the latest version of iSER running over 40/56Gb Ethernet and FDR InfiniBand networks
See metrics for using iSER with the latest flash storage