Paper Title: Enabling Smart NVMe-Based Storage Solutions with FPGAs

Paper Abstract: NVMe and NVMe-over-fabrics today offer ultra low latency and high performance storage transfers, greatly reducing how long CPUs have to wait for them to occur. However, that puts the pressure on CPUs to keep up! FPGAs can help by offloading specific tasks. They can accelerate storage algorithms, speeding up tasks such as aggregation or on-demand storage, or perform much of the protocol overhead, speeding up transfers. FPGAs provide highly adaptable platforms that can improve performance for a wide variety of use cases and workloads. They work at hardware speed, avoid the need for complex software, and can be reprogrammed to handle changes in protocols, architectures, devices, and connections. The results are smart, scalable, and configurable system solutions that can take full advantage of the capabilities of NVMe drives.

Paper Author: Deboleena Sakalley, Principal Engineer, Xilinx

Author Bio: Deboleena Sakalley is a Data Center/Storage Systems Principal Architect in the Xilinx Software and IP Solutions Group. Deboleena architects storage solutions with a primary focus on networked flash storage platforms and storage acceleration using FPGAs. She has been working on various forms of flash storage including ONFi/Toggle NAND, Serial and Parallel NOR, NVMe, and NVMe over fabrics for the past 13 years. She holds nine patents, , 3 related to flash storage and one on NVMe over fabric technology. Before joining Xilinx, Deboleena worked at Freescale Semiconductor and STMicroelectronics. She holds a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.