Paper Title: NVMe/TCP Is the Best Way to Disaggregate Flash Storage

Paper Abstract: Direct-attached storage (DAS) is common in datacenters, where it is used to run many demanding applications. However, its use has major drawbacks, because DAS is expensive and inflexible, and creates storage silos. What if we could give applications the performance and latency of DAS along with the cost and flexibility of disaggregated storage, all while using existing networking gear? Enter NVMe over TCP/IP. NVMe/TCP is an emerging transport for NVMe over Fabrics that is fast, scalable, easy to understand, and extremely simple to deploy. With NVMe/TCP, applications can get the performance, latency, and latency consistency of DAS while enjoying all the benefits of storage disaggregation. Real world use cases in industries such as cloud, autonomous vehicles, and media illustrate its usefulness. Demanding, performance-sensitive applications using direct-attached storage have had it replaced with disaggregated storage connected over NVMe/TCP. The disaggregation reduces costs, increases storage flexibility, provides equivalent or better application performance and latencies than DAS, and most important -- makes customers happy.

Paper Author: Muli Ben Yehuda, CTO and Co-Founder, Lightbits Labs

Author Bio: Muli Ben-Yehuda is the co-founder and CTO of Lightbits Labs, a startup focused on developing cloud infrastructure including networked storage. He was previously Chief Scientist at Stratoscale, where he helped develop software that provides AWS-like features in private clouds, including block and object storage and database-as-a-service. He has also been a researcher and master inventor at IBM, where he was instrumental in developing hypervisor support for zero-cost high-speed I/O: all of the benefits of virtualized I/O with none of the overhead. He is widely recognized as an expert in machine and I/O virtualization and has given talks at many conferences, workshops, and universities, including OSDI (where he received the best paper award), ASPLOS, EuroSys, SYSTOR, VEE, Linux OLS, and FAST. He holds an MSc in Computer Science (summa cum laude) from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) and a BA (cum laude) from the Open University of Israel.