NFS over 40Gbps iWARP RDMA

NFS over RDMA is an exciting development that allows storage managers unprecedented Ethernet performance and efficiency. The Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol (iWARP) is the IETF standard for RDMA over Ethernet and it is particularly well suited for storage protocols like NFS (SMBDirect is another example) because of their characteristics and performance requirements.

iWARP builds upon the proven TCP/IP foundation, and lets users preserve their investments in network security, load balancing and monitoring appliances, and switches and routers. pNFS is another significant advance for NFS, removing scaling bottlenecks through parallelizing client access to storage.

This presentation goes over the trends motivating the use of RDMA in storage applications, and discusses the latest developments on the NFS/RDMA front. It presents new benchmark results for NFS running over 40Gb Ethernet with iWARP RDMA, showing the benefits in performance and efficiency it brings in.

Learning Objectives

The audience will gain an understanding of the benefits of RDMA and iWARP
The audience will gain an understanding of the performance comparisons of 40GE vs FDR IB
The audience will gain an understanding of the performance comparisons of NIC/40GbE, iWARP/40GbE and FDR IB