SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Joseph White
OPI TSC Chair; Dell Fellow/VP
Dell
Dr. Joseph L. White is currently a Fellow with Dell’s CTO office focused on disaggregated infrastructure and storage networking including NVMe-oF and DPUs. Previously Dr. White has worked for Juniper Networks, NetApp (Decru), McDATA, and as a co-founder of Nishan Systems, one of the first companies to champion IP storage within the industry to deliver enterprise quality multi-protocol SAN switches, routers, and gateways. Dr. White has a PhD in High Energy Particle Physics from Rice University
Related Sessions
NVMe-oF: Protocols & Transports Deep Dive
Abstract Block storage access across Storage Area Networks (SANs) have an interesting protocol and transport history. The NVMe-oF transport family provides storage administrators with the most efficient and streamlined protocols so far leading to more efficient data transfers and better SAN deployments. In this session we will explore some of the protocol history to set the context for a deep dive into NVMe/TCP, NVMe/RoCE, and NVMe/FC. We will then examine network configurations, network topology, QoS settings, and offload processing considerations. This knowledge is critical when deciding how to build, deploy, operate, and evaluate the performance of a SAN as well as understanding end to end hardware and software implementation tradeoffs. Agenda SAN Transport History and Overview Protocol History Protocol Comparisons NVMe/FC Deep Dive NVMe/RoCE Deep Dive NVMe/TCP Deep Dive Networking Configurations and Topologies for NVMe-oF QoS, Flow Control and congestion L2 local vs L3 routed vs Overlay Offload Processing Considerations and Comparisons
OPI (Open Programmable Infrastucture)
A new class of cloud and datacenter infrastructure is emerging into the marketplace. This new infrastructure element, often referred as Data Processing Unit (DPU) or Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU), takes the form of a server hosted PCIe add-in card or on-board chip(s), containing one or more ASIC’s or FPGA's, usually anchored around a single powerful SoC device. The DPU/IPU-like devices have their roots in the evolution of SmartNIC devices but separate themselves from that legacy in several important ways. The OPI project has been created to address these questions and to foster the emergence of such an open and creative software eco-system for DPU/IPU based cloud infrastructure. The project intends to delineate what a DPU/IPU is, to loosely define a framework(s) and architecture for a DPU/IPU-based software stack(s) applicable to any vendors hardware solution, to allow the creation of a rich open source application ecosystem, to integrate with existing open source projects aligned to the same vision such as the Linux kernel, IPDK.io, DPDK and SPDK to create new APIs for interaction with and between the elements of the DPU/IPU ecosystem: * the DPU/IPU hardware * DPU/IPU hosted applications * the host node * remote provisioning software * remote orchestration software
Open Programmable Infrastructure Project Introduction: How we can Together Implement DPU/IPU Infrastructure Across all Vendors
The Open Programmable Infrastructure (or OPI) is an open-source effort within the Linux Foundation to develop a standard API for utilizing SmartNICs, DPUs and IPUs, and other coprocessors or processing elements. It will allow users to provision and orchestrate all devices in the same way, thus allowing them to handle many different devices, implement new devices, and change or replace devices without learning a new command structure. It will also allow manufacturers to create a standard API, deliver new or upgraded devices faster, and benefit from a large ecosystem. It makes learning curves for new devices shorter and implementation or software errors easier to find. It opens new markets for devices and eliminates concerns over one-of-a-kind implementations. This session will explore the goals and progress that the OPI project has undertaken. DPUs have many different use cases implemented by many different vendors. Our goal is to define a common framework for all of these devices to meet those use cases: This includes Infrastructure/ workload isolation, Security, Network offload and acceleration, and Storage offload and acceleration. Over the last year since OPI joined the Linux foundation we have welcomed 14 member companies to our project spanning the landscape from vendors, to integrators, to test infrastructure vendors, end users, as well as operating system and ISV vendors. We have sought to create common provisioning and lifecycle management frameworks, defined APIs for the management of these devices to meet the most common use cases we have researched from end users, and developed a developer platform and lab to test and explore these common frameworks. Come listen to industry experts as we explore the DPU/IPU ecosystem and the OPI project’s progress toward a common set of frameworks, and how these assist end users with ease of deployment, lowers the total cost of development and ownership, and thus provides for broader adoption of this new class of devices.