Paper Title: NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF): High-Speed, Low-Latency Shared Storage

Paper Abstract: NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) extends the high-speed NVMe storage interface to offer low-latency shared storage. It is thus suitable for networks, clusters, storage arrays, hyperconverged systems, and megawebsites. Like the basic NVMe, it is much faster than disk interfaces while still based on a widely used, heavily standardized, and familiar interface (the PCIe bus used as an extender in personal computers). It will work with a variety of transports, including Ethernet/TCP, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, RoCE (remote DMA over converged Ethernet), and PCIe itself. Latency is low, and both use cases and the ecosystem are growing rapidly. Storage designers can expect it to become a standard for shared storage in enterprise, high-performance computing, embedded, mil/aero, hyperconverged, and other applications.

Paper Author: Rob Davis, VP Storage Technology, Mellanox

Author Bio: Rob Davis is Vice President of Storage Technology at Mellanox where he focuses on ways to apply high-speed interfaces to storage systems. As a technology leader and visionary for over 35 years, he has been a key figure in the development of an entire generation of storage networking products. He is currently leading the development and marketing of products based on NVMe over fabrics, which will allow for the high-speed networking of PCIe-based storage. Davis was previously Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at QLogic, where he drove development and marketing of Fibre Channel, Ethernet and InfiniBand technology into new markets such as blade servers. Before joining QLogic, Davis worked at Ancor Communications, where he drove development and marketing of Fibre Channel and InfiniBand products. Davis’ areas of expertise include virtualization, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, InfiniBand, RoCE (remote DMA over converged Ethernet), SAS, PCI, SATA, Persistent Memory, NVMe and flash storage.