Infrastructure Processing Units (IPU) is an evolution of SmartNIC, focusing on infrastructure processing such as networking offload and storage offload. IPU is a critical ingredient in the disaggregated computer architectures and becomes a control point in the DC-oF (Data Center of the Future). In this talk, we would like to share the NVMe over TCP Initiator implementation as an example for IPU based storage offload, focusing on SPDK (https://spdk.io) support for IPU based NVMe over TCP Initiator solution.

Real Time Analytics and Data intensive applications have driven the adoption of high performance, low latency, highly parallel NVMe solutions and now we are in the cusp of wide adoption of NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) Storage in both On-Prem and Cloud Data Centers. Since the introduction of NVMe-oF, a lot of investment and effort have gone in to improve the overall storage performance and features resulting in substantial improvement of IOPs and CPU utilization and lowering the TCO for the customer.

Storage Area Networks (SANs) are usually used to access the most critical data of an organization, therefore ensuring their security is of paramount importance. This presentation will introduce the general SAN security threats and the methods (authentication and secure channel) to mitigate them. It will also present the authentication protocol and secure channel specifications that have been defined for NVMe-oF over IP fabrics, with special attention to the NVMe/TCP case.

NVMe/TCP has the potential to provide significant benefits in application environments ranging from the Edge to Data Center. However, to fully unlock its potential, we first need to overcome NVMe over Fabrics' discovery problem. This discovery problem, specific to IP based fabrics, can result in the need for the Host admin to configure each Host to access the appropriate NVM subsystems. In addition, any time an NVM Subsystem is added or removed, the Host admin needs to update the impacted hosts.

This session provides an overview of designing and implementing NVMe/TCP across shared storage for the enterprise. This session will cover enabling this technology in Dell PowerStore, and will be co-presented with VMware to discuss NVMe/TCP initiator support. An analysis on the benefits of NVMe/TCP will be covered, along with the ecosystem support needed to ensure enterprise readiness, simplicity and scale.

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.

EDSFF (Enterprise and Data Center SSD Form Factor) SSD has been widely adopted in hyper-scale data centers because of superior manageability, serviceability, and power/thermal characteristics. The new form factor provides high performance (support up to PCIe Gen6) and high capacity (up to 128TB), and allows to support new type of devices like NIC, accelerator, and CXL DRAM device in a system. However, adopting of EDSFF in NVMe-oF system is non-trivial. For example, with EDSFF SSD, the capacity of single storage server can easily have Petabyte in total.

As large deployments become more common, our industry needs a standardized, multi-vendor solution to boot computer systems from OS images stored on NVMe® devices across a network. The newly published NVM Express® Boot Specification and ecosystem partnership with UEFI and ACPI enables this by leveraging the NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) standard. This talk is a dive into the details of the new specification and the design of an open-source prototype for booting over NVMe/TCP transport using a UEFI implementation.

Security for NVMe over Fabrics is highly sought by customers and evolving at a fast pace. Experience with initial implementations uncovered a few shortcomings in the original design of certain NVMe/TCP security features that have resulted in recent security protocol changes. Furthermore, a lack of understanding on how configured single-system NVMe over Fabrics security policies interact led to the standardization in NVM Express of an interoperability framework. This session will explain these recent developments in NVMe-oF security and their importance to achieve a secure SAN.

Join us for a technical deep dive into open-source storage technology and its practical application with Ceph and its new SPDK-based NVMe-oF target. This session aims to explore an exciting advancement that brings together Ceph, an open-source software-defined storage system, and industry-standard protocols, focusing on NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF). NVMe-oF is a widely adopted, high-performance storage access protocol that provides users seamless access to Ceph clusters, opening up new possibilities for efficient data storage and retrieval.