Implementation of Light-weight I/O Stack for NVMe-over-Fabrics

Implementation of Light-weight I/O Stack for NVMe-over-Fabrics

Most of today's large-scale cloud systems and enterprise data centers are distributing resources to improve scalability and resource utilization. NVMe-over-Fabric protocol allows submitting NVMe commands to a remote NVMe SSD through RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) network. It is attracting attention recently because it is possible to construct a disaggregation storage system with low latency through the protocol. However, the current I/O stack of NVMe-over-Fabric has an inefficient structure for maintaining compatibility with the traditional I/O stack. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new mechanism to reduce I/O latency and CPU overhead by modifying I/O path of NVMe-over-Fabric to pass through legacy block layer. According to the performance evaluation results, the proposed mechanism is able to reduce the I/O latency and CPU overhead by up to 22% and 24% compared to the existing NVMe-over-Fabrics protocol, respectively.