Latest developments with NVMe/TCP | SNIA

Abstract

NVMe over Fabrics is a powerful standard that provides fast access to non-volatile memory devices across fabric interconnects. An emerging NVMe-oF transport is good old TCP/IP. Its benefits are obvious, as it is fast, scalable, well-understood, and extremely simple to deploy. TCP/IP is, after all, the most widely used network protocol of them all, and well known and heavily-implemented in every data center. The major question is how to achieve high performance and low latency with TCP/IP. As most designers know, TCP/IP has pitfalls, such as timeout-based retranmissions and incast. However, performance results are very promising. The NVMe Technical Working Group is building both the standard and its open-source implementation in concert. Its prominent features include data integrity and transport layer security. In practice, NVMe/TCP is an excellent transport for networked flash and complements NVMe/RDMA and NVMe/FC nicely.