NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF): The End of the Storage Bottleneck?

David Naidoo

Head of Technical Sales

For decades, storage area networks (SANs) have been limited by the SCSI protocol, designed in the era of spinning hard drives. Now, NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) is unleashing the full potential of flash storage across the network.

The Problem with iSCSI

While All-Flash Arrays provide incredible internal speeds, connecting them via iSCSI or Fibre Channel introduces a protocol tax. The CPU must translate NVMe commands to SCSI, send them over the wire, and translate them back.

Enter NVMe-oF

NVMe-oF allows hosts to access remote storage devices using the NVMe command set directly. This reduces latency from ~200µs to <10µs, effectively making remote storage indistinguishable from local DAS.

Transports: TCP vs RDMA

NVMe/TCP runs on standard Ethernet switches (like the Cisco Nexus 9000), making it easy to deploy. NVMe/RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) offers slightly lower latency but requires lossless networks with Data Center Bridging (DCB).