OpenStack and NVMe-over-Fabrics: Getting higher performance for network-connected SSDs

The evolvement of the NVMe interface protocol is a boon to SSD-based storage arrays. It further powered SSDs (solid state drives) to obtain high performance and reduced latency for accessing data. Benefits further extended by the NVMe over Fabrics network protocol brings NVMe feature retained over the network fabric, while accessing the storage array remotely. Let’s understand how.While leveraging NVMe protocol with storage arrays consists of high-speed NAND and SSDs, a latency was experienced when NVMe based storage arrays were accessed through shared storage or storage area networks (SAN). In SAN, data should be transferred between the host (initiator) and the NVMe-enabled storage array (target) over Ethernet, RDMA technologies (iWARP/RoCE), or Fibre Channel. Latency was caused due a translation of SCSI commands into NVMe commands, in the data transportation process. To address this bottleneck, NVM Express introduced the NVMe over Fabrics protocol, to get replaced with iSCSI as a storage networking protocol. With this, the benefits of NVMe were taken onto network fabrics in a SAN-kind of architecture to have a complete end-to-end NVMe-based storage model which is highly efficient for modern workloads. NVMe-oF supports all available network fabrics technologies, such as RDMA (RoCE, iWARP), Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe), Infiniband, Future Fabrics, and Intel Omni-Path architecture.