Heavy Networking 641: Network Design For NVMe Over Fabric

Today on Heavy Networking, we’re talking storage network design. We’re discussing NVMe over fabric, where your Ethernet and IP network is the fabric. Not that those are the only fabric choices you could make with NVMe over fabric…but we’ll spend most of our time there.

Many NVMe over fabric discussions focus on what’s happening inside the storage packets themselves, because hey, NVMe is cool tech. But in this conversation, we will focus on the network. What does the topology need to be? What are the latency and loss characteristics of an NVMe transport fabric? What QoS tools should you be considering, how do they work, and when should you use them?

Our guest for this vendor-neutral conversation is J Metz. J is Director, Systems Design and Engineering at AMD; Chair, SNIA; Former Board Member, NVM Express.