Linux is widely deployed as the kernel for NAS devices. And, since most NAS devices support SMB, Samba is also frequently found inside these devices.

Thus, the NAS market is the bleeding edge of FLOSS license compliance. Specifically, it is the first time in history that GPLv3’d software is widely deployed and distributed. Conservancy has already engaged in substantial enforcement work in NAS devices, and continues to monitor it and raise enforcement actions on behalf of its Samba member project.

Today’s routable fabrics are inherently inefficient, requiring significant switching software overhead to route data through the fabric to its intended destination. An unintended consequence of this inefficiency and excessive overhead in high load situations is lost packets, which compounds the latency and throughput problems. This presentation provides details of a new approach to network technology which overcomes the inefficiency and overhead within switched networks by eliminating the traditional switch altogether.

Nearly all object storage, including Ceph and Swift, support erasure coding because it is a more efficient data protection method than simple replication or traditional RAID. However, erasure coding is very CPU intensive and typically slows down storage performance significantly. Now Ethernet network cards are available that offload erasure coding calculations to hardware for both writing and reconstructing data. This offload technology has the potential to change the storage market by allowing customers to deploy more efficient storage without sacrificing performance.

A number of scale out storage solutions, as part of open source and other projects, are architected to scale out by incrementally adding and removing storage nodes. Example projects include: Hadoop’s HDFS CEPH Swift (OpenStack object storage) The typical storage node architecture includes inexpensive enclosures with IP networking, CPU, Memory and Direct Attached Storage (DAS). While inexpensive to deploy, these solutions become harder to manage over time. Power and space requirements of Data Centers are difficult to meet with this type of solution.

The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) Project released an open source NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) software target in conjunction with release of the NVMe-oF specification in 2016. This target has continued to evolve to ensure linear scaling with the addition of CPU cores, NICs, and NVMe devices, all while maintaining the low latency characteristics of RDMA and FC. This talk will address a number of challenges encountered during this evolution of the SPDK NVMe-oF target including:

Any IT infrastructure that supports high performance computing workflows needs to be able to handle a large number of files, and large amounts of data storage with high throughput access to all the data. Legacy file systems can’t supply high throughput and high file IOPS, as they were designed for HDD and are not suitable for low latency, small file IO and metadata heavy workloads that are common in HPC. This results in I/O starvation to the GPUs and CPUs, a major problem for an HPC system.

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.

Linux is usually at the edge of implementing new storage standards, and NVMe over Fabrics is no different in this regard. This presentation gives an overview of the Linux NVMe over Fabrics implementation on the host and target sides, highlighting how it influenced the design of the protocol by early prototyping feedback. It also tells how the lessons learned during developing the NVMe over Fabrics, and how they helped reshaping parts of the Linux kernel to support over Fabrics and other storage protocols better.

There is a new PCIe based very high performance flash interfaced called NVMe available today from many flash device suppliers. This session will explain how this local server based technology is now expanding its capabilities to the network. And with protocol offload technology is able to maintain local performance level. The original NVMe technology was developed by an industry standards group called NVM Express.

NVMe is catching fire in the market and after years of incubation it is poised to become a major player in server, storage and networking implementations. In this session, G2M Research will discuss the development, deployment models, uses cases and market opportunity for NVMe across enterprise, Telco, Cloud, IoT and embedded applications. NVMe will be used for more than just accelerating SSD, it will become a major player in new computing models for compute, fabrics, analytics, application acceleration, systems management and more.