Providing QoS guarantees in the LightOS NVMe/TCP software defined storage system | SNIA

Abstract

Providing quality of service guarantees is a major task of service deployments in cloud environments. NVMe over TCP is the latest novel trend in the world of storage. It combines two major disciplines of storage and networking. Each of them has its own QoS challenges, and their combination makes it even more complex. In this talk, we survey issues such as head-of-line blocking, differential services, storage overload, and throughput guarantees for the mixed workloads. We show how we address them in the Lightbits LightOS software defined storage system, and specifically, discuss the separation of NVMe connections over TCP sockets, and a multi-threaded arbitration algorithm to enable differentiated service. With LightOS, a cloud provider can provide to (and charge for) each NVMe/TCP volume different service guarantees.