Paper Title: Handling the Network Requirements of High-Speed NVMe SSDs

Paper Abstract: Today's NVMe SSDs can provide data at rates up to 20 Gb/s, with higher numbers coming. Such rates are essential to meet the requirements of applications such as real-time analysis, AI/ML, IoT, and high-performance video and wireless. However, they put tremendous strain on network resources. How do designers match the network to today's needs and tomorrow's expectations at a reasonable cost? Solutions include higher-speed Ethernet connections, rack-scale architectures, composable infrastructure and compute storage disaggregation to improve scalability and meet disparate application requirements. New storage stacks are also critical to take full advantage of SSDs, persistent memory, and high-speed switches and routers. Of course, all these approaches come with their own costs and limitations. Designers will need a deep understanding of network behavior to achieve cost-effective, scalable solutions that extend even to the largest hyperscale datacenters.

Paper Author: Rob Davis, VP Storage Technology - Networking Business Unit, NVIDIA
Manoj Wadekar, Storage Architect, Facebook

Author Bio: Rob Davis is Vice President of Storage Technology at Mellanox where he focuses on ways to apply their high-speed interfaces (such as 40G and 100G) to storage systems. Over the last two years he has moved Mellanox into a leadership position in NVMe over Fabrics. As a technology leader and visionary for over 35 years, he has been a key figure in the development of an entire generations of storage networking products. Davis was previously VP/CTO 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, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, RoCE (remote DMA over converged Ethernet), and NVMe. He has presented at many conferences, including Storage Developer Conference, Red Hat Summit, Open Infrastructure Summit, and many past Flash Memory Summits.

Author 2 Bio: Manoj Wadekar is a Storage Architect at Facebook, where he focuses on designing and delivering storage servers for FB infrastructure. Before joining Facebook, he was Director Hardware Engineering at eBay, where he led the team to deliver hyperscale compute, storage, and AI/ML servers. His tasks included hardware design, performance benchmarking, regression/qualification/automation, and supply chain management. He has also been VP Technology at Fibre Channel leader QLogic, where he developed product roadmaps and advanced technology. He has over 25 years total experience in the technology industry. Manoj holds 10 patents, has written three publications, and has been VP and Technology Director for the Ethernet Alliance. He earned an Master’s of Technology in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He has spoken at many conferences, including the OCP Global Summit and past Flash Memory Summits.