NVMe Over Fabrics High performance SSDs Networked for Composable Infrastructure

Rob Davis from Mellanox gave this talk at the 2018 OCP Summit. “There is a new very high performance open source SSD interfaced called NVMe over Fabrics now available to expand the capabilities of networked storage solutions. It is an extension of the local NVMe SSD interface developed a few years ago driven by the need for a faster interface for SSDs. Similar to the way native disk drive SCSI protocol was networked with Fibre Channel 20 years ago, this technology enables NVMe SSDs to be networked and shared with their native protocol. By utilizes ultra-low latency RDMA technology to achieve data sharing across a network without sacrificing the local performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs, true composable infrastructure is now possible.”

Video: Gen-Z High-Performance Interconnect for the Data-Centric Future

Greg Casey from Dell gave this talk at the 2018 OCP Summit. “Gen-Z is different. It is a high-bandwidth, low-latency fabric with separate media and memory controllers that can be realized inside or beyond traditional chassis limits. It treats all components as memory (so-called memory-semantic communications), and it moves data between them with minimal overhead and latency. It thus takes full advantage of emerging persistent memory (memory accessed over the data bus at memory speeds). It can also handle other compute elements, such as GPUs, FPGAs, and ASIC or coprocessor-based accelerators.”

Overview of the HGX-1 AI Accelerator Chassis

“The Project Olympus hyperscale GPU accelerator chassis for AI, also referred to as HGX-1, is designed to support eight of the latest “Pascal” generation NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA’s NVLink high speed multi-GPU interconnect technology, and provides high bandwidth interconnectivity for up to 32 GPUs by connecting four HGX-1 together. The HGX-1 AI accelerator provides extreme performance scalability to meet the demanding requirements of fast growing machine learning workloads, and its unique design allows it to be easily adopted into existing datacenters around the world.”

Video: SSD – The Transition from 2D to 3D NAND

“In 2013, Western Digital acquired flash storage hardware and software supplier, Virident, for $685 million in cash. They followed that up in May 2016, with the acquisition of SanDisk Corporation. The addition of SanDisk makes Western Digital Corporation a comprehensive storage solutions provider with global reach, and an extensive product and technology platform that includes deep expertise in both rotating magnetic storage and non-volatile memory (NVM).”