Paper Title: Hardware Acceleration Techniques for NVMe-oF

Paper Abstract: The move from direct-attach to Composable Infrastructure is being driven by large datacenters seeking increased business agility combined with lower TCO. This requires new remote-attached storage solutions which can deliver extremely high data rates with minimal latency overhead. Unfortunately, the industry-standard embedded processors used in controllers aren't fast enough to manage complex protocols at the required speed. For example, they cannot keep up with the work required to access NVMe SSDs efficiently over an NVMe-oF networked infrastructure. The solution is to add accelerators, typically built using an ASIC, FPGA, or other high-speed hardware. These accelerators offload the processing of protocols such as RDMA, TCP, and NVMe. The result is essentially the same performance for remote storage accessed over a network as for direct-attached storage. The combination provides an optimal blend of high performance, low power, and low cost to yield tremendous CAPEX and OPEX savings in the next-generation datacenter. The technology enables virtually limitless scalability, and will drive dramatically lower TCO for hyperscale and as-a-service datacenter applications.

Paper Author: Bryan Cowger, VP Sales/Marketing, Kazan Networks

Author Bio: Bryan Cowger is VP Sales/Marketing at Kazan Networks, a startup developing ASICs that target new ways of attaching and accessing flash storage in enterprise and hyperscale datacenters. Kazan Networks’ products utilize emerging technologies such as NVMe and NVMe-oF. Bryan has spent his career defining and bringing to market successful high-performance storage networking ASICs for such protocols as Fibre Channel, SAS, SATA, Ethernet, PCIe, and NVMe. He has over 25 years of storage industry experience and has been awarded 4 patents in the area of storage controller architecture. Before joining Kazan Networks, he was VP Sales/Marketing & Co-Founder at Sierra Logic, a developer of SATA-to-Fibre Channel controllers. He also has over 10 years as a design engineer at Hewlett-Packard and Agilent Technologies. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from UC San Diego.