SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
SmartNICs, The Architecture Battle Between Von Neumann and Programmable Logic
Abstract
This presentation will outline the architectures for the top three platforms in each of these two categories, Von Neumann and Programmable Logic. Showing how vendors like NVIDIA, Pensando, Marvell, Achronix, Intel, and Xilinx have chosen to architect their solutions. We will then weigh the merits and benefits of each approach while also highlighting the performance bottlenecks. By the end of the presentation, it may be fairly clear where the industry is headed, and which solutions may eventually win out.
Learning Objectives
- The difference between Von Neumann and Programmable Logic Architectures.
- How each architecture addresses the challenges faced by heigh speed networks.
- The flaws in each of the two architectural approaches.
- The benefits of each architectural approach.
- Where the market is heading, both in the short and longer term.
Related Sessions
SmartNICs, The Architecture Battle Between Von Neumann and Programmable Logic
This presentation will outline the architectures for the top three platforms in each of these two categories, Von Neumann and Programmable Logic. Showing how vendors like NVIDIA, Pensando, Marvell, Achronix, Intel, and Xilinx have chosen to architect their solutions. We will then weigh the merits and benefits of each approach while also highlighting the performance bottlenecks. By the end of the presentation, it may be fairly clear where the industry is headed, and which solutions may eventually win out.
Introducing Fabric Notifications, from Awareness to Action
Marginal links and congestion have plagued storage fabrics for years and many independent solutions have been tried. The Fibre Channel industry has been keenly aware of this issue and, over the course of the last two years, has created the architectural foundation for a common ecosystem solution. Fabric Notifications employs a simple message system to provide registered participants with information about key events in the fabric that are used to automatically address link integrity and congestion issues. This new technology has been embraced by the Fibre Channel community and has demonstrated a significant improvement in addressing the nagging issues. In this informative session, storage experts will discuss the evolution of this technology and how it is a step toward a truly autonomous SAN.
Exploiting RDMA to create a geographically dispersed storage network over the WAN with real-time access to data
Accessing data within an enterprise spread across geo-diverse locations challenges work productivity, time, and IT resources. Existing methods require data to be transferred and replicated leading to delayed business insights or even insights based on stale data. In addition, having to send a copy of data to every user that requires it leads to copy sprawl, data management challenges and compromised data security. Even with data transfer, data arrives at the destination in an unpredictable time and performance varies with data type/size and application. Utilizing network data mover appliances and applications is so cumbersome that even physical transportation of media or data is considered an acceptable solution. In summary, there is a need to access data without replication across geographic distances. It is commonly accepted that remote application execution is not possible when a high Bandwidth Delay Product (BDP), i.e., the product of a link's capacity (in [x]bits per second) and its round-trip delay time (in [x]seconds), exists between the compute location and the data location. The BDP between the compute and data when they are within a data center, on a LAN, or in the same Cloud provider, is acceptable for most common applications. However, as soon as the BDP increases traversing a WAN over even minor latencies, these same applications are functionally unusable due to the time required to get the data to the location of the compute. BDP has major impact on traditional networks using the TCP/ IP protocol; various methods have been used to optimize or tune TCP/IP to make it more efficient with moderate results. The Vcinity Data Access Platform™ (VDAP) enables enterprises to instantly access and operate on data sets over any distance, with local performance, and without copying them. This is accomplished by transforming the enterprise WAN into a Global LAN enabling local application performance on data over global distances. This capability lets enterprises leverage modern business tools such as machine learning modeling and artificial intelligence innovations leading to more efficient business processes and a greater competitive advantage. The concept of turning WAN into Global LAN and enabling a Global Fabric is achieved through RDMA over WAN. With over 32 patents as the underpinning to the VDAP portfolio, it’s the individual advancements that in aggregate achieve application reach-in to data over distance.
The solution is made up of an RDMA based network fabric at Layer 2 or layer 3 incorporating the following:
- Routing at layer 3 supporting L2/L3 tunneling
- Data inflight buffering / crediting creating a lossless WAN tunnel
- Packet loss recovery for efficient error correction
- End-to-end flow control for forward and backward congestion signaling
- Tunnel monitoring, heartbeat and occupancy threshold support
- Priority classification
- Standard NFS / SMB/ S3 extensibility
- Packet flow segmentation and reassembly
- Security through in-flight encryption and multipath obfuscation
The result is the ability to sustain 90%+ of theoretical data throughput on global distances to provide applications the same performance experience as when the data is local to the application. As seen above the Vcinity Data Access Platform integrates with other HPC technologies and high-speed storage. It attaches to a standard NAS or transitional high-speed storage tier and, when connected over the MAN/ WAN, provides a high-performance, geo-diverse data exchange. VDAP enables a global federated data platform for accessing data without replication, using global namespace and network-mapped drive volumes across geographically distributed enterprise storage.
Fabric Notifications - An Update from Awareness to Action
Introduced in 2021, Fabric Notifications developed into a key resiliency solution for storage networks. Providing the ability to respond to events impacting the Fabric, Fabric Notifications enhances the overall user experience when deploying traditional Fibre Channel SANs. In this session, the improvements in the user experience are profiled for solutions using Linux, AIX, and PowerPath. The latest developments in both standards and market solutions are also provided as an update to this exciting new technology.
Scaling NVMe over IP Fabric Security
NVMe over IP is a technology able to provide complete and scalable SAN solutions. Security is of paramount importance for SANs and the fundamental methods to secure NMVe over IP fabrics (i.e., DH-HMAC-CHAP authentication and TLS secure channel) have been defined. However, the security provisioning of these methods does not scale yet to large fabrics. This presentation will explain these scalability constraints and will explain how an additional mechanism, called Authentication Verification Entity, is able to make security for NVMe over IP fabrics simple, scalable, and effectively deployable.
Converging PCIe and TSN Ethernet for Composable Infrastructure in High-Performance In-Vehicle Embedded Systems
Costs and risks of implementing High-Performance Embedded Systems such as Centralized Car Servers for Autonomous Vehicles can be reduced when borrowing from modern datacenter technology. Therefore, PCIe and Multi-Gigabit Ethernet have become a foundation for automotive in-vehicle infrastructure. While the needs for storage in automotive are somewhat relaxed, compared to datacenters, automotive has a need for “unconventional” storage connectivity like many sensors to few CPUs to single SSD. And, unlike datacenters, automotive comes with strong constraints for size, weight and power, and real-time guaranties. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is an evolving set of IEEE standards for Ethernet based networks. It brings time synchronization (IEEE 802.1AS) along with low bounded latency via traffic scheduling (IEEE 802.1Qbv) and/or traffic shaping (IEEE 802.1Qav) and ultra-reliability via frame replication and elimination (IEEE 802.1CB), and thus, is one of the best positioned options for in-vehicle networking. In combination with reliable transports such as TCP/IP this enables deterministic networking for distributed systems. In our presentation we will describe the needs of modern automotive networking and storage architectures, and will share approaches for converging (real-time) Ethernet and PCIe as a common fabric for reliable and cost-efficient implementations. We showcase first performance results of a proof-of-concept implementation. We close with an outlook of the potential benefits of TSN and Deterministic Networking to other composable storage architectures.
