episode 97: #97 – Building Storage Using NVMe/TCP with Kam Eshghi from Lightbits Labs
This episode was recorded live at Dell Technologies World 2019. Chris talks to Kam Eshghi, VP of Strategy & Business Development at Lightbits Labs. Lightbits has pioneered the development of NVMe/TCP, which allows standard Ethernet NICs to be used for NVMe-over-Fabrics storage traffic.
The ability to implement NVMe-oF without custom NICs (like RDMA) offers the potential to deploy NVMe fabrics in hyper-scaler and enterprise data centres with lower cost and complexity compared to existing solutions, but what are the drawbacks? Kam explains how NVMe/TCP can be implemented on high-speed networks that even include multiple switch hops or operate between data centres. The solution offers significant benefits with disaggregated and composable infrastructures where compute and storage can be mapped dynamically across the network.
Lightbits implements NVMe/TCP as software or as a storage array (SuperSSD), which includes an optional PCIe card to offload some more CPU-intensive tasks. You can find more information at https://www.lightbitslabs.com/.
Elapsed Time: 00:20:24
Timeline
* 00:00:00 – Intros
* 00:01:00 – What is NVMe/TCP?
* 00:04:00 – Why use NVMe/TCP instead of RDMA?
* 00:07:00 – NVMe/TCP will work across multiple network hops and switches
* 00:08:00 – How is network performance managed?
* 00:09:30 – How would NVMe/TCP be deployed?
* 00:12:20 – Reference code and an SPDK is available for target-mode NVMe/TCP
* 00:14:00 – How are enterprise customers using NVMe/TCP?
* 00;16:30 – Teaser – vSAN could be enabled with NVMe/TCP
* 00:17:40 – Wrap Up and a view of the future
Transcript
Kam’s Bio
Kam Eshghi, VP of Strategy & Business Development, Lightbits Labs Kam joined Lightbits Labs from DellEMC and has over 20yrs of experience in strategic marketing and business development with startups and public companies. Most recently as VP of strategic alliances at startup DSSD, Kam led business development with technology partners and developed DSSD’s partnership with EMC, leading to EMC’s acquisition of DSSD. Previously as Sr. Director of Marketing & Business Development at IDT, Kam built their NVMe Controller business from scratch. Previous to that Kam worked in data center storage, compute and networking markets at HP, Intel, and Crosslayer Networks. Kam is a U.C. Berkeley and MIT graduate with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an MBA.
Related Podcasts & Blogs
* NVMe over Fabrics – Caveat Emptor?
* The Race towards End-to-End NVMe in the Data Centre
* #82 – Storage Predictions for 2019
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