The SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) is coming up September 24-27, 2018 at the Hyatt 
Regency Santa Clara CA. The agenda is now live!
SNIA on Storage is teaming up with the SNIA Technical Council to dive into major themes of the 
2018 conference. The SNIA Technical Council takes a leadership role to develop the content for each SDC, so SNIA on Storage spoke with Bill Martin, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair and SSD I/O Standards at Samsung Electronics, to understand why SDC is bringing NVMe and NVMe-oF to conference attendees.
SNIA On Storage (SOS): What is NVMe and why is SNIA emphasizing it as one of their key areas of focus for SDC?
Bill Martin (BM): NVMeTM, also known as NVM ExpressR, is an open collection of standards and information to fully expose the benefits of non-volatile memory (NVM) in all types of computing environments from mobile to data center.
SNIA is very supportive of NVMe. In fact, earlier this year, SNIA, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), and the NVM Express organizations formed a new alliance to coordinate standards for managing solid state drive (SSD) storage devices. This alliance brings together multiple standards for managing the issue of scale-out management of SSDs. It’s designed to enable an all-inclusive management experience by improving the interoperable management of information technologies.
With interest both from within and outside of SNIA from architects, developers, and implementers on how these standards work, the SNIA Technical Council decided to bring even more sessions on this important area to the SDC audience this year. We are proud to include 16 sessions on NVMe topics over the four days of the conference.
SOS: What will I learn about NVMe at SDC?
Performance is always of interest to storage developers. We’ll have a session on accelerating storage with NVMe SSDs, and several others on the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), with a historical perspective on key design decisions and a discussion on the driver’s advantages and limitations. In other sessions, attendees can get an update on how the Fibre Channel industry is combining the lossless, highly deterministic nature of Fibre Channel with NVMe, and learn how to deploy in-storage computing with the NVMe interface.
SOS: I’ve heard a lot recently about something called NVMe-oF. What is that and are there any sessions on it at SDC?
BM: NVMe-oF is an acronym for NVMe over Fabrics, and SDC will cover how both the NVMe interface and NVMe-oF underlying protocols (such as RoCE, iWARP and FC) provide a highly efficient access to flash storage. Attendees will learn how architects are rethinking Ceph architecture for disaggregation using NVMe over Fabrics, how to manage storage services using NVMe-oF based on SNIA SwordfishTM and DMTF RedfishTM management interfaces, and how to deliver scalable distributed block storage using NVMe-oF.
SOS: I see in the SDC agenda that you’ll be speaking on Key Value Storage. Can you explain this topic and how SNIA is involved in this area?
BM: A number of applications and companies are now contemplating using a different type of storage interface. The NVMe Key Value project is a proposal for a new command structure to access data on an NVMe controller. This proposed command set provides a key and a value to store data on the Non-Volatile media and provides a key to retrieve data stored on the media.
The primary interface work is being done within the NVMe technical working group. What SNIA is doing within their Object Drive Technical Work Group is an application programming interface, known as an API. We expect to have a document ready for review by SDC, and my session on Monday September 24 at 2:30 pm will discuss where we are in the SNIA standardization process of a Key Value API.
SOS: How can I get “prepped” on NVMe before SDC?
BM: I would check out two videos on NVMe on the SNIA Video Channel, both by SNIA Board Member J Metz. One is a snapshot on NVMe, NVMe-oF, and Ethernet Storage with directions to more resources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=yh68WIj68XI
The other is his presentation from Storage Field Day on SNIA and NVMe-over-Fabrics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfcZwkPzj4w
Another great resource is the SNIA Podcasts on NVMe and many other topics – located at https://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer/podcasts
SOS: Any final thoughts on NVMe?
BM: On behalf of the SNIA Technical Council, I would like to invite everyone at SDC and in the Silicon Valley technology community to come to the Birds of a Feather session on Tuesday September 25 at 7:00 pm and join the local Bay Area NVMe Meetup group for an open discussion on NVMe technology. We’ll have leading experts from Cisco Systems, Eideticom, Samsung, SK hynix, and Toshiba Memory on hand to discuss some of their latest projects and answer questions on implementing or using solutions based on the NVMe standard. This session is open to anyone interested in NVMe and does not require an SDC badge, so invite your colleagues to join us in the Stevens Creek room at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara.
SOS: Thanks for your time, Bill, and see you at SDC!