Paper Title: End to End Gen4 NVMe-oF through PCIe Fabric and Smart NIC

Paper Abstract: NVMe-oF is the latest emerging technology in datacenter because of its ability to provide lower-latency, high-performance storage. People expect it could change current datacenter architecture significantly. On the brink of the transfer of PCIe Technology to Gen4, we would like to talk about how NVMe-oF will be in the Gen4 age with a PCIe fabric switch. Integrating the PCIe Gen4 smart NICs within a PCIe Gen4 fabric switch, the clients could access PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs installed in the PCIe switch via NVMe-oF. The smart NICs are connected to host ports of PCIe switch. NVMe SSDs could be assigned to the smart NICs. Using the NVMe-oF, external clients could reach the NVMe SSDs with least latency and high performance. Moreover, the NVMe SSDs could be dynamically moved among different NICs depends on requirement of bandwidth and capacity without reboot the switch or client hosts. To get better backward compatibility, on the basis of SPDK, we build a platform to connect with different protocoal and transportation type concurrently. That means clients could use NVMe or SCSI, transmit by RDMA or TCP to access the storage box.

Paper Author: Brian Pan, General Manager, H3 Platform

Author Bio: Brian Pan is the founder of H3 Platform, a leading cloud solution provider that provide the PCIe composable technology to cloud operators. He received a BA degree in ME of NCKU and MBA master degree of NCCU. He has engaged with Tier 1 AI research lab in North American (the biggest car hiring solution) and Tier 1 branding server vendors. Before devoting to H3 Platform, Brian served as sale director at Oracle Taiwan, ZyXEL, and QNAP whose clients include Cisco, Fujitsu, Seagate and IO Data. During this engagement, he closely work with customer to figure out the requirements then work with RD team to develop the required solutions. He has applied two patents in PCIe composable solution and HPC (NVMe to GPU). Brian love to hands on it to figure the key benefits from customer pain points then find a way to solve it. He will keep venturing into the HPC area to maximize the utilization of accelerators, interconnect and storage.