OCP Global Summit: Mellanox Introduces NVMe SNAP Technology to Simplify Composable Storage

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced NVMe SNAP (Software-defined, Network Accelerated Processing), a storage virtualization solution for public cloud, private cloud and enterprise computing.

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This SNAP technology allows customers to compose remote server-attached NVMe flash storage and access it as if it were local, to achieve all the efficiency and management benefits of remote storage, with the simplicity of local storage.

The SNAP solution eliminates the inefficiency of local storage while addressing a need for compute and storage disaggregation and composability at cloud scale. It enables faster adoption of NVMe-oF in different data center environments by enabling integration into almost any server with any OS or hypervisor, effectively enabling immediate deployment of NVMe-oF technology for any application.

The NVMe SNAP solution, delivered as part of the BlueField family of PCIe SmartNIC adapters, makes networked flash storage appear as local NVMe storage, virtualizing the physical storage.

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Local NVMe SSDs are already supported by all major OSs and hypervisors. SNAP makes use of these existing NVMe interfaces, to give customers the composability and flexibility of networked flash storage, combined with the advantages of local SSD performance, management, and software transparency. This technology is combined with BlueField’s multicore ARM processors and virtual switch and RDMA offload engines, to enable a broad range of accelerated storage, software defined networking, and application solutions. These processors in combination with SNAP can be used to accelerate distributed file systems, compression, de-duplication, big data, AI, load balancing, security and other applications.

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“We have a long history of delivering not just high-speed networking, but greater efficiency to servers, storage, and applications,” said Dror Goldenberg, VP, software architecture, Mellanox. “Customers have relied on us to deliver higher bandwidth, efficient transport, software-defined networking, and packet processing acceleration. Now we can hep them virtualize and accelerate storage as well, making cloud and enterprise computing faster, composable, more secure, and more efficient.“

“As the largest online retailer and biggest Internet company by revenue in China, JD.com is a leader in building and operating cutting-edge data centers,” said Gang He, corporate VP, JD Group, and head, product development, JD Cloud. “The ability to provision remote networked storage as local storage using the Mellanox NVMe SNAP framework helps us design a composable infrastructure that is flexible and agile to meet our evolving storage needs.“

“Customers rely on the revolutionary E8 Storage architecture for the most demanding workload, such as genomics, real-time analytics, and accelerating scale-out file systems like IBM Spectrum Scale,” said Ziv Serlin, VP, architecture, and co-founder, E8 Storage Systems, Ltd. “They want the ability to access our high-performance and highly-available NVMe-oF arrays from many different types of servers and to keep as much of the servers’ CPU power as possible available for those workloads. For those reasons, we look forward to leveraging Mellanox’s NVMe SNAP to virtualize E8 all-flash arrays as local NVMe storage on many types of servers.“

“NVMe SNAP lets more customers take advantage of Excelero’s high-performance NVMesh storage solution and Remote Direct Drive Access functionality,” said Yaniv Romem, CTO and co-founder, Excelero, Inc. “NVMesh is the ideal storage for 4K and 8K video production, databases, containers, and high-performance computing use cases, and NVMe SNAP allows a broader range of OSs and hypervisors access NVMesh as if it were local storage. We are excited to work with Mellanox on integrating NVMesh with NVMe SNAP on BlueField SmartNICs to both simplify composable NVMe storage and make more client CPU cores available to run critical applications.“

As more workloads move to public and private cloud infrastructure and servers increasingly use faster 25, 50 and 100GbE network speeds, customers face increasing challenges to meet storage capacity, management, and performance requirements. While providing fast performance, it is hard to fully utilize, protect, and share local storage. networked storage, based on NVMe-oF, improves resource utilization, flexibility, and capacity planning, but requires specific support from OSs, hypervisors, and applications. SNAP allows remote storage to appear as if it were direct-attached NVMe flash, in a way that is transparent to the OS and hypervisor. This allows all applications running on virtualized, containerized, or bare metal servers to enjoy the performance benefits of local storage with the manageability, data protection, and efficiency of networked storage.

“Customers want to achieve Total Infrastructure Efficiency across servers, storage, and networking, and the Mellanox NVMe SNAP solution offers them a way to achieve exactly that,” said R. Scott Raynovich, chief analyst, Futuriom, market research firm. “Our recent survey of over 200 cloud and enterprise professionals revealed that their biggest concern around virtualization and containers is overcoming the performance penalties of virtualization. As they deploy SmartNICs as a way to make their data centers more efficient, the second-most popular use case for SmartNICs is to virtualize and share flash storage more efficiently. A SmartNIC like BlueField that can both virtualize flash storage and accelerate SDN has tremendous potential with cloud and large enterprise customers.“

The company has showcased NVMe SNAP technology at the 2019 OCP Global Summit in San Jose, CA.

Resources:
Blog: SNAP on Simplifying Composable Infrastructure with NVMe Hardware Virtualization
Video: NVMe SNAP Watch 2-minute Overview
Futuriom Secrets of the Datacenter Survey Report (registration required)
Mellanox SmartNIC
Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC VPI
Mellanox Storage Solutions

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