Paper Title: Updated Comparison Between NVMe-oF Transports

Paper Abstract: Several years later and NVMe-oF marches on, a follow on from FMS19! Lossless fabrics were the first transports for NVMe-oF, however their deployments came with higher cost and complexity than their lossy counterparts. Lossless fabrics have been improving, but lossy transports such as TCP/IP have also made great strides in addressing their weak points, making them more attractive for many NVMe-oF use-cases. The gravitation towards lossy fabrics is fueled by their ubiquity, cost-effectiveness, and simplicity. This presentation will cover some enhanced congestion and flow control mechanisms for TCP, updated comparisons of NVMe/TCP to RoCE including performance, as well as some hardware vs. software implementation tests. Straight-forward, consistent, performant, NVMe-oF implementations on ethernet are approaching, paving the way for broader storage disaggregation adoption.

Paper Author: Grant Mackey, Sr. Technologist, Western Digital

Author Bio: Grant Mackey is a Sr. Technologist at Western Digital, where for the past 8 years he has focused on storage systems architecture of devices and platforms for a variety of teams within the organization. Areas include discrete event simulation of parallel and distributed storage system architectures and new memory fabrics, as well as prototyping efforts of novel storage architectures and new computational technologies. Prior to his time at Western Digital, he spent some time in the folly that is tech startups, learning that you can in fact create something like Kafka in a bubble, only to have a much larger organization release it some time later, completely ruining your value proposition. Additionally, he spent time at Los Alamos National Lab researching how high-performance computing storage architectures can better service the analysis efforts of petascale scientific simulations. Grant earned his MS CpE from the University of Central Florida. James Leighton is a Technologist of Systems Architecture at Western Digital. His focus is storage networks, accelerators, IT and test infrastructures. Prior to Western Digital, he helped bring up the next generation of modular core switches at Aruba, abused iSCSI and first generation NVMe-oF adapters as a Principal Engineer at QLogic, and kept the sanity of hundreds of students and staff by keeping our small college's underfunded IT infrastructure alive. James earned his BS in Computer Engineering from California State University, Sacramento, and in his off time can be found designing PCBs for fun or keeping the rhythm with his trusty LTD D-6.