DPU as a Storage Initiator for bare metal performance and virtualization

With the NVMe/TCP and disaggregated storage gaining rapid market adoption, it is more clear than ever that Storage Initiator (SI) needs to be more performant and efficient to provide applications with DAS (Direct Attached Storage) like performance and latency. At the same time, there is a growing need from virtualized applications for secure transport and storage performance near bare metal. The Host CPU can save a significant number of cycles by offloading the NVMe/TCP to a DPU based Storage Initiator (SI). On top of that, the SI also provides rich storage services like data encryption, data compression, security (TLS), QoS, and others with no additional cost to the Host CPU. The SI also provides the bare metal storage performance to the applications running on the VMs. This presentation will go over the important requirements for a client DPU that can be used as an SI and why a DPU based SI like Fungible Acceleration Card is a necessity for modern day application servers. We will also take a closer look at the performance and latency benefits with the NVMe/TCP offloaded. Finally, we will also discuss management/orchestration of SI using NVMe discovery service and open source Orchestration Systems like OpenStack and Kubernetes.