Category: Ethernet Data Storage

NVMe®/TCP Q&A

Erik Smith
The SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) had an outstanding response to our live webinar, “NVMe/TCP: Performance, Deployment, and Automation.” If you missed the session, you can watch it on-demand and download a copy of the presentation slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Our live audience gave the presentation a 4.9 rating on a scale of 1-5, and they asked a lot of detailed questions, which our presenter, Erik Smith, Vice Chair of SNIA NSF, has answered here. Q: Does the Centralized Discovery Controller (CDC) layer also provide drive access control or is it simply for discovery of drives visible on the network? A: As defined in TP8010, the CDC only provides transport layer discovery. In other words, the CDC will allow a host to discover transport layer information (IP, Port, NQN) about the subsystem ports (on the array) that each host has been allowed to communicate with. Provisioning storage volumes to a particular host is additional functionality that COULD be added to an implementation of the CDC. (e.g., Dell has a CDC implementation that we refer to as SmartFabric Storage Software (SFSS). Q: Can you provide some examples of companies that provide CDC and drive access control functionalities? Read More

SmartNICs to xPUs – Why is the Use of Accelerators Accelerating?

Alex McDonald
As applications continue to increase in complexity and users demand more from their workloads, there is a trend to again deploy dedicated accelerator chips to assist by offloading work from the main CPU.  These new accelerators (xPUs) have multiple names such as SmartNIC (Smart Network Interface Card), DPU, IPU, APU, NAPU. How are these different than GPU, TPU and the venerable CPU? xPUs can accelerate and offload functions including math, networking, storage functions, compression, cryptography, security and management. It’s a topic that the SNIA Networking Storage Forum will spotlight in our 3-part xPU webcast series. The first webcast on May 19, 2022 “SmartNICs to xPUs – Why is the Use of Accelerators Accelerating?” will cover key topics about, and clarify questions surrounding, xPUs, including… Read More

An FAQ on Data Reduction Fundamentals

John Kim
There’s a fair amount of confusion when it comes to data reduction terminology and techniques. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a live webcast, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask: Data Reduction.”  It was a 101-level lesson on the fundamentals of data reduction, which can be performed in different places and at different stages of the data lifecycle. The goal was to clear up confusion around different data reduction and data compression techniques and set the stage for deeper dive webcasts on this topic (see the end of this blog for info on those). As promised during the webcast, here are answers to the questions we didn’t have time to address during the live event. Q. Does block level compression have any direct advantage over file level compression? Read More

25 Questions (and Answers) on Ethernet-attached SSDs

Ted Vojnovich
The SNIA Networking Storage Forum celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by hosting a live webcast, “Ethernet-attached SSDs – Brilliant Idea or Storage Silliness?” Even though we didn’t serve green beer during the event, the response was impressive with hundreds of live attendees who asked many great questions – 25 to be exact. Our expert presenters have answered them all here: Q. Has a prototype drive been built today that includes the Ethernet controller inside the NVMe SSD? Read More

Object Storage Questions: Asked and Answered

John Kim
Last month, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a live webcast, “Object Storage: What, How and Why.” As the title suggests, our NSF members and invited guest experts delivered foundational knowledge on object storage, explaining how object storage works, use cases, and standards. They even shared a little history on how object storage originated.  If you missed the live event, you can watch the on-demand webcast or find it on our SNIAVideo YouTube Channel. We received some great questions from our live audience. As promised, here are the answers to them all. Read More

Will NVMe-oF™ Mean the End of iSCSI?

Tim Lustig
iSCSI is a block storage protocol for storage networking. It’s been around since 1988, is supported by multiple operating systems, and has been a standard since 2000. iSCSI has been used mostly for so-called “secondary” block storage, meaning storage for applications that are important but not mission-critical, and storage that must deliver good—but not great—performance. Read More

Are Ethernet-attached SSDs Brilliant?

Ted Vojnovich
Several solid state disk (SSD) and networking vendors have demonstrated ways to connect SSDs directly to an Ethernet network. They propose that deploying Ethernet SSDs will be more scalable, easier to manage, higher performance, and/or lower cost than traditional storage networking solutions that use a storage controller (or hyperconverged node) between the SSDs and the network. Who would want to attach SSDs directly to the network? Are these vendors brilliant or simply trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist? What are the different solutions that could benefit from Ethernet SSDs? Which protocols would one use to access them? How will orchestration be used to enable applications to find assigned Ethernet SSDs? How will Ethernet SSDs affect server subsystems such as Ethernet RAID/mirroring and affect solution management such as Ethernet SAN orchestration?  And how do Ethernet SSDs relate to computational storage? Read More

The Blurred Lines of Memory and Storage – A Q&A

John Kim
The lines are blurring as new memory technologies are challenging the way we build and use storage to meet application demands. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a “Memory Pod” webcast is our series, “Everything You Wanted to Know about Storage, but were too Proud to Ask.” If you missed it, you can watch it on-demand here along with the presentation slides. We promised Q. Do tools exist to do secure data overwrite for security purposes? A. Most popular tools are cryptographic signing of the data where you can effectively erase the data by throwing away the keys. There are a number of technologies available; for example, the usual ones like BitLocker (part of Windows 10, for example) where the NVDIMM-P is tied to a specific motherboard. There are others where the data is encrypted as it is moved from NVDIMM DRAM to flash for the NVDIMM-N type. Other forms of persistent memory may offer their own solutions. SNIA is working on a security model for persistent memory, and there is a presentation on our work here. Read More

Storage Congestion on the Network Q&A

Tim Lustig
As more storage traffic traverses the network, the risk of congestion leading to higher-than-expected latencies and lower-than expected throughput has become common. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a live webcast earlier this month, Introduction to Incast, Head of Line Blocking, and Congestion Management. In this webcast (which is now available on-demand), our SNIA experts discussed how Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand each handles increased traffic. The audience at the live event asked some great questions, as promised, here are answers to them all. Q. How many IP switch vendors today support Data Center TCP (DCTCP)? Read More

Network Speeds Questions Answered

John Kim
Last month, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a webcast on how increases in networking speeds are impacting storage. If you missed the live webcast, New Landscape of Network Speeds, it’s now available on-demand. We received several interesting questions on this topic. Here are our experts’ answers: Q. What are the cable distances for 2.5 and 5G Ethernet? A. 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T Ethernet are designed to run on existing UTP cabling, so it should reach 100 meters on both Cat5e and Cat6 cabling. Reach of 5GBASE-T on Cat 5e may be less under some conditions, for example if many cables are bundled tightly together. Cabling guidelines and field test equipment are available to aid in the transition. Read More