Paper Title: A Journey into NVMe-oF: Options, Trade-offs, and Challenges

Paper Abstract: Data center architects are faced with a world of NVMe-oF choices that will determine successful wide deployment of disaggregated NVMe-oF storage. As the NVMe-oF ecosystem continues to mature, storage system architects now have design choices of the type of fabrics to use, as well as the various attach points. PCIe, RoCE, TCP, FC, and IB are among the fabric choices available. This talk will explore the unique properties and trade-offs associated with the underlying transport, convergence with other traffic, and scale of fabrics.

Paper Author: Ihab Hamadi, Head of Systems Architecture, Western Digital

Author Bio: Ihab Hamadi is a Fellow at Western Digital, where he focuses on the innovation and growth of the company's platforms business, delivering data and application-centric solutions for the enterprise and cloud. He has a solid 21-year track record of building leading edge cloud computing, data storage, networking, and virtualization technology and solutions. Before joining Western Digital, Ihab was Distinguished Technologist at HPE Aruba, leading development teams that contributed to OpenSwitch project and created ArubaOS-CX network operating systems, a modern OS for the mobile and IoT era, built from the ground-up to support Intent Based Networking. Ihab has also held a wide range of technology leadership positions with Broadcom, Emulex, and other companies. He earned a MS degree in computer engineering from the University of Denver.