Category: NVMe

NVMe Key-Value Standard Q&A

John Kim
Last month, Bill Martin, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair, presented a detailed update on what’s happening in the development and deployment of the NVMe Key-Value standard. Bill explained where Key Value fits within an architecture, why it’s important, and the standards work that is being done between NVM Express and SNIA. The webcast was one of our highest rated. If you missed it, it’s available on-demand along with the webcast slides. Attendees at the live event had many great questions, which Bill Martin has answered here: Q. Two of the most common KV storage mechanisms in use today are AWS S3 and RocksDB. How does NVMe KV standards align or differ from them? How difficult would it be to map between the APIs and semantics of those other technologies to NVMe KV devices? A. KV Storage is intended as a storage layer that would support these and other object storage mechanisms. There is a publicly available KVRocks: RocksDB compatible key value store and MyRocks compatible storage engine designed for KV SSDs at GitHub. There is also a Ceph Object storage design available. These are example implementations that can help an implementer get to an efficient use of NVMe KV storage. Q. At which layer will my app stack need to change to take advantage of KV storage?  Will VMware or Linux or Windows need to change at the driver level?  Or do the apps need to be changed to treat data differently?  If the apps don’t need to change doesn’t this then just take the data layout tables and move them up the stack in to the server? Read More

An FAQ on RAID on the CPU

Paul Talbut Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, SNIA EMEA hosted a webcast to introduce the concept of RAID on CPU. The invited experts, Fausto Vaninetti from Cisco, and Igor Konopko from Intel, provided fascinating insights into this exciting new technology.

The webcast created a huge amount of interest and generated a host of follow-up questions which our experts have addressed below. If you missed the live event “RAID on CPU: RAID for NVMe SSDs without a RAID Controller Card” you can watch it on-demand.

Q. Why not RAID 6?

A. RAID on CPU is a new technology. Current support is for the most-used RAID levels for now, considering this is for servers not disk arrays. RAID 5 is primary parity RAID level for NVMe with 1 drive failure due to lower AFRs and faster rebuilds.

Q. Is the XOR for RAID 5 done in Software?

A.Yes, it is done in software on some cores of the Xeon CPU.

Q. Which generation of Intel CPUs support VROC?

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Understanding the NVMe Key-Value Standard

John Kim
The storage industry has many applications that rely on storing data as objects. In fact, it’s the most popular way that unstructured data—for example photos, videos, and archived messages–is accessed. At the drive level, however, the devil is in the details. Normally, storage devices like drives or storage systems store information as blocks, not objects. This means that there is some translation that goes on between the data as it is ingested or consumed (i.e., objects) and the data that is stored (i.e., blocks). Naturally, storing objects from applications as objects on storage would be more efficient and means that there are performance boosts, and simplicity means that there are fewer things that can go wrong. Moving towards storing key value pairs that get away from the traditional block storage paradigm makes it easier and simpler to access objects. But nobody wants a marketplace where each storage vendor has their own key value API. 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

Got SPDK Questions?

Tim Lustig
We kicked-off our 2020 webcast program by diving into how The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) fits in the NVMe landscape. Our SPDK experts, Jim Harris and Ben Walker, did an outstanding job presenting on this topic. In fact, their webcast, “Where Does SPDK Fit in the NVMe-oF Landscape” received at 4.9 rating on a scale of 1-5 from the live audience. If you missed the webcast, I highly encourage you to watch it on-demand. We had some great questions from the attendees and here are answers to them all: Q. Which CPU architectures does SPDK support? Read More

Hyperscalers Take on NVMe™ Cloud Storage Questions

J Metz
Our recent webcast on how Hyperscalers, Facebook and Microsoft are working together to merge their SSD drive requirements generated a lot of interesting questions. If you missed “How Facebook & Microsoft Leverage NVMe Cloud Storage” you can watch it on-demand. As promised at our live event. Here are answers to the questions we received. Q. How does Facebook or Microsoft see Zoned Name Spaces being used? Read More

SPDK in the NVMe-oF™ Landscape

Tim Lustig
The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) has gained industry-wide recognition as a framework for building highly performant and efficient storage software with a focus on NVMe™. This includes software drivers and libraries for building NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) host and target solutions. On January 9, 2020, the SNIA Networking Storage Forum is going to kick-off its 2020 webcast program by diving into this topic with a live webcast “Where Does SPDK Fit in the NVMe-oF Landscape.” Read More

How Facebook & Microsoft Leverage NVMe Cloud Storage

J Metz
What do Hyperscalers like Facebook and Microsoft have in common? Find out in our next SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) webcast, How Facebook and Microsoft Leverage NVMe Cloud Storage, on November 19, 2019 where you’ll hear how these cloud market leaders are using NVMe SSDs in their architectures. Our expert presenters, Ross Stenfort, Hardware System Engineer at Facebook and Lee Prewitt, Principal Hardware Program Manager, Azure CSI at Microsoft, will provide a close up look into their application requirements and challenges, why they chose NVMe flash for storage, and how they are successfully deploying NVMe to fuel their businesses. You’ll learn: Read More

Key Value Storage – A Talk with Bill Martin of the SNIA Technical Council

khauser Leave a comment

SNIA has a new specification in town – focused on key value storage.  SNIA on Storage sat down with Bill Martin, Co-Chair of the SNIA Technical Council and Co-Chair of the SNIA Object Drive Technical Work Group, to understand why SNIA took on this project and what are the results.

SNIA On Storage (SOS):  Bill, thanks for taking the time to chat with us.   To get started, can you tell me what key value storage is and how it relates to the Technical Work charter that SNIA undertakes?

Bill Martin (BM):  Key value storage is a new method of storing data when compared to the traditional block storage method.  You store a “Value” related to a “key (address)”, with the ability to then look up the value in the future using the “key” of the associated object. Read More

Author of NVMe™/TCP Spec Answers Your Questions

J Metz

900 people have already watched our SNIA Networking Storage Forum webcast, What NVMe™/TCP Means for Networked Storage? where Sagi Grimberg, lead author of the NVMe/TCP specification, and J Metz, Board Member for SNIA, explained what NVMe/TCP is all about. If you haven’t seen the webcast yet, check it out on-demand.

Like any new technology, there’s no shortage of areas for potential confusion or questions. In this FAQ blog, we try to clear up both.

Q. Who is responsible for updating NVMe Host Driver?

A. We assume you are referring to the Linux host driver (independent OS software vendors are responsible for developing their own drivers). Like any device driver and/or subsystem in Linux, the responsibility of maintenance is on the maintainer(s) listed under the MAINTAINERS file. The responsibility of contributing is shared by all the community members.

Q. What is the realistic timeframe to see a commercially available NVME over TCP driver for targets? Is one year from now (2020) fair?

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