Paper Title: Benefits and Challenges of using SmartNICs for Distributed Shared Storage

Paper Abstract: As businesses strive to have actionable analytics, the data processing speed becomes one of the main optimization parameters requiring an extremely fast and scalable storage infrastructure. Converged infrastructure has become the design of choice for many web-scale and service provider data-centers reducing TCO and providing levels of efficiency close to those of public cloud. In this approach, every node in the data-center is built upon cost-effective standard off-the-shelf hardware and storage infrastructure is defined and managed by software layers. For applications such as real-time analytics or HPC, the performance requirements mean that flash media is a necessity. The NVMe protocol specifically provides benefit for flash media access, since it is naturally lockless and reduces the software stack overhead. An additional benefit for scale-out storage deployments is the protocol's extension to media access over a network, NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMeoF), which is naturally mapped onto RDMA fabric protocols like Infiniband or RoCE.

Paper Author: Kirill Shoikhet, Chief Technical Architect, Excelero

Author Bio: Kirill Shoikhet has over 20 years of software development and architecture experience in various aspects of high performance and distributed systems including storage, networking, performance analysis and diagnostics. Prior to joining Excelero Kirill spent over 7 years with XtremIO, last 2.5 years leading its next generation architecture activities. Kirill holds an MSc in Computer Sciences from the Technion.