Paper Title: Achieving High Performance and Low Latency with NVMe over TCP/IP

Paper Abstract: NVMe over Fabrics is a powerful standard that provides fast access to non-volatile memory devices across fabric interconnects. An emerging NVMe-oF transport is good old TCP/IP. Its benefits are obvious, as it is fast, scalable, well-understood, and extremely simple to deploy. TCP/IP is, after all, the most widely used network protocol of them all, and well known and heavily-implemented in every data center. The major question is how to achieve high performance and low latency with TCP/IP. As most designers know, TCP/IP has pitfalls, such as timeout-based retranmissions and incast. However, performance results are very promising. The NVMe Technical Working Group is building both the standard and its open-source implementation in concert. Its prominent features include data integrity and transport layer security. In practice, NVMe/TCP is an excellent transport for networked flash and complements NVMe/RDMA and NVMe/FC nicely.

Paper Author: Sagi Grimberg, Principal Architect, Lightbits Labs

Author Bio: Sagi Grimberg is a co-founder and principal architect at LightBits Labs, as well as an active Linux Kernel maintainer. He leads the protocol standardization for NVMe over TCP/IP and contributed all the open-source code. Sagi is also an active contributor to the Linux kernel as well as co-maintaining the NVMe subsystem and maintaining the iSER subsystem. He has been working on storage and networking technologies for over a decade. Before founding Lightbits Labs, Sagi led the Linux storage software activity at Mellanox. He has written technical articles, made conference and meetup presentations, and participated in other standards work. He earned his BSc in computer engineering cum laude from Bar-Ilan University (Israel).