NVMe Over TCP Will Take Time to Eclipse RDMA

By Gary Hilson, EETimes
February 2, 2019

TORONTO — This year is already predicted to be a big one for NVMe-over-Fabric, and NVMe over TCP is expected to be a significant contributor.

The NVMe/TCP Transport Binding specification was ratified in November and joins PCIe, RDMA, and Fiber Channel as an available transport. A key benefit of the NVMe/TCP is that it enables efficient end-to-end NVMe operations between NVMe-oF host(s) and NVMe-oF controller devices interconnected by any standard IP network. At the same time, it maintains the performance and latency characteristics that enable large-scale data centers to use their existing Ethernet infrastructure and network adapters. It’s also designed to layer over existing software-based TCP transport implementations while also ready for future hardware-accelerated implementations.

One of the most active participants in the development of the NVMe/TCP specification is Israeli startup Lightbits, which is using it as a foundation for transforming hyperscale cloud-computing infrastructures from being reliant on a bunch of direct-attached SSDs to a remote low-latency pool of NVMe SSDs.

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