NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) Technology
Overview
What is NVMe over Fabrics?
While NVMe is the industry standard for PCIe SSDs to connect and transfer data between a host and target storage device or subsystems, NVMe over Fabrics is a recent extension for more efficient scaling of data center storage architecture enabling storage networking of NVMe devices over different fabric types..
NVMe-oF enables sharing of NVMe based storage devices across multiple servers leverage ubiquitous fabrics, such as Ethernet, to deliver:
- Disaggregation of flash and shareable pools of NVMe memory operating at faster rates resulting in cost effective fabric based storage;
- Low-latency and high IOPS of NVMe storage systems
- Scalable storage with almost direct-attach level performance by allows applications to maintain fast storage access time, whether connected locally or remotely.
The way in which commands and responses are sent and received is a key difference between NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics. NVMe relies on the PCIe interface protocol to map commands and responses to shared host memory. In contrast, NVMe over Fabrics enables use of PCIe alternatives for communications between an NVMe host and target storage devices. This effectively extends the distance within a data center over which NVMe host devices and remote NVMe storage subsystems can be connected, with the stated goal of adding no more than 10 microseconds of latency.
Industry development efforts are currently focused on two types of fabric transports for NVMe:
- NVMe over Fabrics using RDMA (RoCE, iWARP, and InfiniBand)
- NVMe over Fabrics using Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe)
In addition to Microsemi's work with UNH-IOL to ensure proper NVMe compatibility and direct contributions into the NVM Express Work Group as a board member, Microsemi collaborates with industry ecosystem leaders to advance NVMe over Fabrics using RDMA, such as in its NVMe over Fabrics P2P reference architecture developed in conjunction with industry leaders. Learn more about Microsemi's Accelerate Ecosystem.
Contact your local Microsemi sales office today to find the right NVMe over Fabrics technologies and products for your data center storage needs.
Resources
Blogs
- Having Fun at Queue Depth = 1: What Next Generation Non Volatile Memory (NG-NVM) means for PCIe SSDs and SSD Drivers
- What's Hot in Storage? NVMe over Fabrics, SMR, PMEM and more! Highlights from SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference 2015
- Flash Memory Summit 2015 Special: NVMe + RDMA = Awesome!
- Why Management is Critical for Data Center Lifecycle Management
- Flashtec + Memblaze PBlaze 4 = NVM Express SSD Awesomeness!
- UCSD Non Volatile Memory Workshop: Paving the Way for Persistent Main Memory
- SNIA NVM Summit: NVDIMMs, Programming Models and Next-Generation Non-Volatile Memory
- Project Donard: P2P Communication with NVM Express Devices, Part 1
- Project Donard: P2P Communication with NVM Express Devices, Part 2
- Latest on NVMe Open Source Drivers for Windows and VMware
- A Data Center Fast Lane for Large Files
- Latency in LDPC-based Next-Generation SSD Controllers