J Metz

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.

Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) has piqued the interest of many people in the storage world. Using a robust, efficient, and highly flexible transportation protocol for SSDs, Flash, and future Non-Volatile Memory storage devices, the NVM Express group is working on extending these advantages over a networked Fabric. We will explore not only what NVMe over Fabrics is, but also specifically pay attention to how it works.

Learning Objectives

In the past few years there has been no shortage of storage technologies that have surged into the common vernacular, with even more acronyms: NVMe, SDS, HCI, CI, etc. Many of the paradigms for storage haven’t changed all that much, however, and many of the comparisons and conversations focus around benchmarks and metrics that emphasize the importance of “hero numbers” over practical uses.

This presentation will examine a rubric for examining the right questions to ask, not just the answers. In particular, we’ll be covering

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In this, the sixth entry in the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask,” popular webcast series we look into some of the nitties and the gritties of storage details that are often assumed. When looking at data from the lens of an application, host, or operating system, it’s easy to forget that there are several layers of abstraction underneath before the actual placement of data occurs. In this webcast we are going to scratch beyond the first layer to understand some of the basic taxonomies of these layers.

NVMe over Fabrics is a specification developed by the NVM Express, Inc organization. The idea behind NVMe-oF is to provide transport-agnostic means for delivering NVMe storage commands to remote devices. This presentation, though, examines those transports specifically, and explore some of the contracts and comparisons for how they interact with NVMe-oF bindings. The presentation covers a refresher of NVMe and NVMe-oF in general, as well as RDMA, Fibre Channel, and TCP fabrics.

In this installment of the “The Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask” webcast series, we open up Pandora’s Box and peer inside the world of storage management, uncovering some of the key technologies that are used to manage devices, storage traffic, and storage architectures. In particular, we discuss:

In this, the seventh entry in the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” popular webcast series we look into the mysticism and magic of what happens when you send your data off. Once you click “Save,” for example, where does it actually go?

When we start to dig deeper beyond the application layer, we often don’t understand what happens behind the scenes. In this webcast we discuss:

New solid state storage technologies are forcing the industry to refine distinctions between networks and other types of system interconnects. The question on everyone’s mind is, when is it beneficial to use networks to access solid state storage, particularly persistent memory? The answer to this question involves application, interconnect, memory technology and scalability factors that can be analyzed in the context of a latency budget. In this talk we will explore latency budgets for various types of solid state storage access.

One of the most used technologies in Data Centers today is the storage protocol iSCSI. With the increasing speeds for Ethernet, the technology is more and more appealing because of its relative low cost to implement. However, like any other Storage Technology, there is more here than meets the eye.

In this webcast, we will be focusing entirely on iSCSI. We’ll start by covering the basic elements that will make your life easier if you are considering using iSCSI in your architecture. In particular we will be talking about: