NVMe/TCP Makes iSCSI Look like Fortran

For more than two decades, iSCSI was the go-to protocol standard for remote block storage over commodity network hardware, utilizing normal Ethernet networks, hence mitigating specialist hardware, saving cost, and providing a much lower entry barrier than Fibre Channel or Infiniband.

However, the underlying storage technologies made leaps during that time, and today iSCSI is often a bottleneck for high-performance storage deployments, backed by SSDs or NVMe. Therefore, the NVMe Express group defined the NVMe over Fabrics protocol family, with NVMe over TCP being at the forefront to replace iSCSI, while offering lower latency, higher throughput, and less protocol overhead.

Let’s dive into NVMe, NVMe over TCP, and how it’s superior to iSCSI, as well as the support landscape.