NVMe(F) - A Low Latency High Bandwidth Storage Solution

NVMe-oF is a specification-defined extension to NVMe that enables NVMe-based communication over interconnects other than PCIe. This interface makes it possible to connect “external” storage enclosures to a server, either directly or through a switch, while still using NVMe as the fundamental communication mechanism. The NVMe-oF protocol can be carried over multiple different physical interconnects, including transports such as RoCE, InfiniBand, and Fibre Channel. Regardless of the interconnect, NVMe-oF is transport agnostic. Server and storage communicate through NVMe-oF, independent of the underlying transport that is used to carry the NVMe-oF protocol.

Especially on RDMA enabled networks like InfiniBand, where the fabric protocol adds only approximately 10 µs latency on top of the MVMe latency high bandwidth low latency storage solutions can be deployed. NEC has successfully deployed NVMe-oF with a performance beyond 1 TB/s with a read latency lower than 100 µs.