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You've heard of lots of kinds of storage solutions, from external hard drives to a NAS. However, what you may not have heard of was NVMe over TCP, a way to use the NVMe protocol over a network. Technically speaking, when you say that you have an NVMe SSD, what you're really saying is that you have an SSD that uses the NVMe protocol, and this is a way to use the NVMe protocol over a wireless network.

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What is NVMe over TCP?

Accessing high-speed-storage over a network

NVMe over TCP is low latency, and it works over standard ethernet. That means you don't need to replace anything in your network to use it, and it also makes it incredibly cost-effective. It's low latency as well, and maintains a high level of throughput, just like you would expect from an NVMe SSD. It's part of a wider branch of the NVMe protocol called NVMe-oF, or NVMe over Fabrics. These fabrics include:

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NVMe over Fiber NVMe over ethernet NVMe over Infiniband NVMe over TCP

Because of the speed of the NVMe protocol, you'll need really, really fast internet to saturate that kind of speed. We're talking 100GB/s levels of speed, and it's aimed more at server clusters than enthusiasts. You could definitely build a home network that could make use of it, but it's going to cost you a lot of money (not to mention time) for little benefit.

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What are the benefits of NVMe over Fabrics?

It's all about latency and speed

NVMe over Fabrics basically tries to combine the benefits of NVMe storage with the benefits over remote access to storage. NVMe-oF is designed to replace Direct Attached Storage (DAS) and become a default protocol in the future for cloud infrastructure.

NVMe over TCP is designed to get around some of the bottlenecks of an iSCSI configuration, as its designed for flash storage rather than spinning media. It's more efficient, faster, and lower latency, so it's a networked storage solution that actually works better for flash storage overall.

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However, as already mentioned, that doesn't make it worth it to implement it in your home network. It's built for incredibly fast transfer speeds with low latency, and the benefits that it can provide are ones that are most noticeable in the likes of a data center rather than a home network. For your own home network, iSCSI is more than good enough to use as a networked storage solution that's fast enough for transferring over a network.

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There are a lot of interesting storage protocols out there, and it's easy to forget that NVMe is a protocol rather than a specific type of hardware. That protocol has been implemented in multiple different ways, and NVMe over Fabrics is a great example of how it can really shine.