Steve Jobs famously said “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.” Extending low-latency, parallel NVMe protocol across an entire data center using standard TCP/IP fabric also seemed obvious to us. And that’s how NVMe™/TCP was born!
There’s a lot of interest in NVMe/TCP. Earlier this week, more than 1,100 storage and networking professionals joined a webinar on NVMe/TCP hosted by the SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association), which reported the event among its top four most attended webinars ever.
The discussion focused on educating storage and networking executives in the technology and how they might implement NVMe/TCP in their organizations.
The joint session featured Lightbits’ Sagi Grimberg, the lead author of the NVMe/TCP protocol, as well as Cisco’s J Metz and Chelsio’s Tom Reu, who outlined various aspects of NVMe, TCP and NVMe/TCP. The session included a robust Q&A with dozens of questions from attendees.
Here are the top 5 takeaways from the session:
1) NVMe/TCP provides low-latency disaggregation to independently scale storage and compute to maximize resource utilization.
2) The benefits of NVMe/TCP include running over standard hardware and connecting any storage node to any compute node via standard Ethernet. It also supports data integrity and in-transit encryption and is well suited for large scale deployments at greater distances.
3) Like NVMe queues, NVMe/TCP connections are completely independent and there’s no controller-wide sequencing or out-of-order reassembly across connections. This provides a highly parallel device access that is designed to address multi-threaded and I/O hungry applications.
4) NVMe/TCP uses a messaging model (Protocol Data Units) to transfer NVMe-oF capsules, Data and other protocol messages.
5) Modern TCP advancements such as DCTCP, ECN, and other technologies are fueling improvements and acceptance of NVMe/TCP.
This is simply a quick takeaway. For a much deeper dive on the NVMe/TCP protocol and its benefits, sign up for the SNIA-sponsored What NVMe/TCP Means for Networked Storage webinar here or contact the Lightbits Labs team here.
