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Configuration Guide for NVM Express* over Fabrics with SPDK for Intel® Ethernet Products with RDMA

Documentation

Content Type Install & Setup

Article ID 000088696

Last Reviewed 03/29/2024

NVM Express* (NVMe*) drives are high-speed, low-latency solid-state drives (SSDs) that connect over the server Peripheral Component Interconnect Express* (PCIe*) bus.

The development of these high-performance drives has spurred new innovation in storage over networking protocols, which takes full advantage of the drive capabilities in data center and cloud environments.

NVMe* over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) provides networked storage at a latency level close to locally mounted storage through a re-architected storage protocol that combines the use of low-latency/high-efficiency fabric technologies, such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) or Fibre Channel (FC) with these high-speed NVMe* drives.

The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) provides a set of tools and libraries for writing high-performance, scalable, user-mode storage applications. SPDK is an open-source project focused on optimizing storage software for the latest-generation CPUs, NVMe* SSDs, and NICs to improve the performance and efficiency of storage applications. It achieves high performance by moving all of the necessary storage drivers into user space and operating in a polled mode instead of interrupts, which avoids kernel context switches and eliminates interrupt handling overhead.

The SPDK community started with a user space, polled-mode, asynchronous, lock-less NVMe* driver and then extended the performance and efficiencies of SPDK to storage networking and virtualization. SPDK provides a high-performance NVMe-oF target and host components that are spec-compliant. Therefore, users can use the Linux* Kernel NVMe-oF host to connect to an SPDK NVMe-oF target and vice versa.

Intel supports NVMe* over Fabrics on two Intel® Ethernet product lines with RDMA technology: