SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Recovering from a Loss of Communication with an NVMe Controller
Abstract
Just like SCSI, NVMeoF installations rely on multiple network paths to maximize the throughput between the NVMe host and controller. And, just like any network, sometimes those paths fail. Come learn about how to recover from those failures in a way that leaves your data intact. And then learn about how to recover more quickly. This presentation will require a basic understanding of the NVMeoF protocol.
Learning Objectives
Describe the data corruption scenarios that correct recovery avoids.
Walk through the steps of recovery and identify the goal accomplished at each step.
Demonstrate optimizations to reduce the time and complexity of recovery.
Related Sessions
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Exploiting RDMA to create a geographically dispersed storage network over the WAN with real-time access to data
Accessing data within an enterprise spread across geo-diverse locations challenges work productivity, time, and IT resources. Existing methods require data to be transferred and replicated leading to delayed business insights or even insights based on stale data. In addition, having to send a copy of data to every user that requires it leads to copy sprawl, data management challenges and compromised data security. Even with data transfer, data arrives at the destination in an unpredictable time and performance varies with data type/size and application. Utilizing network data mover appliances and applications is so cumbersome that even physical transportation of media or data is considered an acceptable solution. In summary, there is a need to access data without replication across geographic distances. It is commonly accepted that remote application execution is not possible when a high Bandwidth Delay Product (BDP), i.e., the product of a link's capacity (in [x]bits per second) and its round-trip delay time (in [x]seconds), exists between the compute location and the data location. The BDP between the compute and data when they are within a data center, on a LAN, or in the same Cloud provider, is acceptable for most common applications. However, as soon as the BDP increases traversing a WAN over even minor latencies, these same applications are functionally unusable due to the time required to get the data to the location of the compute. BDP has major impact on traditional networks using the TCP/ IP protocol; various methods have been used to optimize or tune TCP/IP to make it more efficient with moderate results. The Vcinity Data Access Platform™ (VDAP) enables enterprises to instantly access and operate on data sets over any distance, with local performance, and without copying them. This is accomplished by transforming the enterprise WAN into a Global LAN enabling local application performance on data over global distances. This capability lets enterprises leverage modern business tools such as machine learning modeling and artificial intelligence innovations leading to more efficient business processes and a greater competitive advantage. The concept of turning WAN into Global LAN and enabling a Global Fabric is achieved through RDMA over WAN. With over 32 patents as the underpinning to the VDAP portfolio, it’s the individual advancements that in aggregate achieve application reach-in to data over distance.
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- Routing at layer 3 supporting L2/L3 tunneling
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Costs and risks of implementing High-Performance Embedded Systems such as Centralized Car Servers for Autonomous Vehicles can be reduced when borrowing from modern datacenter technology. Therefore, PCIe and Multi-Gigabit Ethernet have become a foundation for automotive in-vehicle infrastructure. While the needs for storage in automotive are somewhat relaxed, compared to datacenters, automotive has a need for “unconventional” storage connectivity like many sensors to few CPUs to single SSD. And, unlike datacenters, automotive comes with strong constraints for size, weight and power, and real-time guaranties. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is an evolving set of IEEE standards for Ethernet based networks. It brings time synchronization (IEEE 802.1AS) along with low bounded latency via traffic scheduling (IEEE 802.1Qbv) and/or traffic shaping (IEEE 802.1Qav) and ultra-reliability via frame replication and elimination (IEEE 802.1CB), and thus, is one of the best positioned options for in-vehicle networking. In combination with reliable transports such as TCP/IP this enables deterministic networking for distributed systems. In our presentation we will describe the needs of modern automotive networking and storage architectures, and will share approaches for converging (real-time) Ethernet and PCIe as a common fabric for reliable and cost-efficient implementations. We showcase first performance results of a proof-of-concept implementation. We close with an outlook of the potential benefits of TSN and Deterministic Networking to other composable storage architectures.
