Paper Title: Converging on NVMe and NVMe-oF

Paper Abstract: Since the introduction of NVMe, the industry has been moving drive interfaces to NVMe, first with SSDs, now even HDDs. NVMe, using PCIe as the underlying transport, works very well for platform-bounded infrastructures. For external connectivity, the industry introduced NVMe-oF, which runs over multiple interfaces, but only a few are being used in the market. How does this impact traditional storage topologies such as server storage, storage arrays and SDS? What are the new components that make up the new topologies? Let's fast forward to where NVMe and NVMe-oF are now the end-game for all storage connectivity; simply, NVMe for internal connectivity and NVMe-oF for external connectivity. In this presentation, we will review the makeover of the storage topologies with only NVMe and NVMe-oF, looking at the tradeoffs, impacts and what new topologies may arise.

Paper Author: Phil Colline, , Marvell

Author Bio: Phil Colline is a Senior Principal Architect at Marvell with more than two decades of experience as a storage software architect and firmware developer. In his role, Phil is responsible for contributing to the architecture definition for NVMe-oF, NVMe, and other memory-based products. Phil joined Marvell from Seagate Technology, where he was a Principal Software Engineer. At Seagate Technology, he was a member of the Systems Group Advanced Development team and architected, designed and delivered a number of NVMe and NVMe-oF controller and interface solutions for Seagate’s external RAID controllers. Prior to this, Phil was Principal Software Engineer at Dot Hill Systems, where he was responsible for the RAID system solution I/O architecture and the lead architect for the company’s T10 PI feature. Phil holds a B.S in Information and Computer Science from UC Irvine and has been awarded six patents in the areas of data storage and IO interfaces.