NVMe Over Fabric is the latest buzz in storage industry. Almost all the storage companies are developing their storage appliances with NVMeOF support and few of the companies has already launched their product with basic storage functionality support. During this presentation, I will open my presentation with key challenges customers are facing in adopting NVMeOF based solutions and where are Industry today to solve these challenges.

In November 2018, NVMe.org has ratified the NVMe/TCP standard in record time. TCP/IP is the most widely used network protocol of them all, well-known and widely- implemented in every data center. NVMe/TCP brings the power of NVMe over Fabrics to TCP/IP networks by mapping NVMe commands and data movement onto TCP. NVMe/TCP provides performance and latency that are comparable with RDMA without requiring any network changes. Nevertheless, by going over a lossy IP network, any NVMe/TCP implementation must deal with certain network issues such as packet loss and retransmissions.

NVMe has taken the storage world by storm, and is arguably one of the hottest topics around. The NVM Express group, however, is not just resting on its laurels. With over 30 active projects, new features and capabilities are being developed on an ongoing basis. Some of these involve some important additions to how NVMe will work in both local, client, and enterprise environments. This presentation will discuss some of the more prominent developments in NVMe.

NVMe KV (Key-Value) is an industry-wide proposal for a new command structure that allows access to data on an NVMe SSD controller using a key rather than a block address. Developed within the NVM Express technical working group, this Key Value command set provides a key to store a corresponding value on non-volatile media, then retrieves that value from the media by specifying the corresponding key. In addition to extensive work being undertaken by the NVM Express working group, the SNIA has completed an overarching KeyValue API released for a membership vote in January 2019.

The total cost of ownership (TCO) provides a way to understand how customers make purchasing decisions by looking all the costs associated with purchasing and running IT equipment. Business objectives and purchasing criteria vary greatly between customers, and hence a one size fits all TCO model is not adequate for all storage workloads.

NVM Express® technology is driving the next generation of SSDs for data centers. NVMe® SSDs are not limited by legacy form factors or protocols, and they can better address the needs of servers and storage in enterprise and hyperscale data centers. With the varied and dedicated use cases for NVMe SSDs, there are two classifications that generally define and segment these classes: Enterprise and Data Center.

During the last two decades, the data center world has been moving to a “Software Defined Everything” paradigm. This has been taken care of mostly by hypervisors running on the x86 up to recently.