Paper Title: EBOF/Ethernet SSD Use Cases

Paper Abstract: Cloud and enterprise customers deploying high-performance SSDs in their platforms are looking for system-level performance advantages as well as the most cost-optimized solution in terms of $/IOPS and $/GB/s. In an existing Just a Bunch of Flash (JBOF) architecture, where the SSDs sit behind a smartNIC and/or CPU, these higher performance SSDs can cause system-level performance bottlenecks that are limited by the smartNIC bandwidth. As drives are plugged into the JBOF system, the performance of the SSDs doesn't scale linearly resulting in underutilized storage. Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) architecture replaces the JBOF bottleneck components like CPUs and smartNICs with Ethernet switch and terminates NVMe-oF on Ethernet SSDs. Ethernet SSDs bring storage drive level disaggregation and extend support to various network transports such as RoCE or NVMe over TCP. In this presentation, performance data from multiple use cases will be shared to highlight the results of deploying Ethernet SSDs in terms of scalability, disaggregated storage, throughput, and cost. These use cases include applications such as Lustre File System, AI/ML, HCI to CDI, storage expansion shelf and Ceph.

Paper Author: Khurram Malik, Director of Product Marketing, Marvell

Author Bio: Khurram Malik is director of product marketing, Flash BU at Marvell. In this role, he is responsible for working closely with Marvell engineering and design teams to define and develop the company’s solutions targeted to enhance storage performance and efficiency for cloud and enterprise data center applications. Khurram joined Marvell from Samsung Semiconductor Inc. where he was technical marketing manager for SSD enterprise, data center and client product lines. Prior to this, Khurram held the position of senior engineer at SK Hynix Memory Solutions/Link A Media Devices Corporation and during his tenure, designed for both the company’s SSD and HDD products. Previous to this, he held engineering roles at Broadcom Corporation and Maxim Integrated Products, respectively. Khurram holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Saginaw Valley State University and a Master of Science degree in Electronic Engineering from San Jose State University.