Paper Title: NVMe-oF: What Performance Can You Expect for Real Applications?

Paper Abstract: NVMe inside storage and servers is becoming ubiquitous. Gartner is projecting that 89% of servers and 52% of storage systems will have NVMe attach by 2022. The advantages over disk interfaces are obvious - higher bandwidth and lower latency. Now we are seeing NVMe extended to provide system-wide attachment via NVMe-oF and a variety of fabrics. Here again, initial tests show significant advantages over previous networking schemes. Response time is generally quite close to that of attached storage. However, simple tests don't tell the entire story. What are the benefits with real systems that have significant parallelism and many operations going on at the same time? Networks introduce new problems such as traffic issues and noisy neighbors. Fabrics also vary in their maturity and capabilities. Progress is continuing in both network speeds and traffic control methods. Designers can expect NVMe-oF plus NVMe devices to provide outstanding overall performance, particularly in large hyperscale deployments.

Paper Author: Andy Walls, IBM Fellow, CTO FlashSystem, IBM

Author Bio: Andy Walls is Chief Architect and CTO for IBM’s Flash Systems Division. He is also an IBM Fellow, the company’s most prestigious honor. A 35-year storage industry veteran, Andy is a pioneer in enabling flash memory in the enterprise. He has developed enterprise storage systems that achieve high performance, good endurance, and the availability data centers require. He was responsible for the Texas Memory Systems acquisition and has since defined the architecture for all FlashSystem products. He is currently defining next generation products that can be used in traditional SAN environments as well as in clouds and by emerging workloads. He is widely recognized an expert in storage and flash memory. He has designed ASICs, PCBs, firmware stacks, and systems. Known as an innovator, he has filed over 100 patents. Andy earned a BSEE from UC Santa Barbara.