Publication
An Evaluation of NVMe-over-Fabrics for Disaggregated Databases over Fast Networks
Jigao Luo; Nils Boeschen; Tobias Ziegler; Carsten Binnig
In: Meike Klettke; Ralf Schenkel; Andreas Henrich; Daniela Nicklas; Maximilian E. Schüle; Klaus Meyer-Wegener (Hrsg.). Datenbanksysteme für Business, Technologie und Web (BTW 2025), 21. Fachtagung des GI-Fachbereichs ,,Datenbanken und Informationssysteme" (DBIS), 03.-07, März 2025, Bamberg, Germany, Proceedings. GI-Fachtagungen (BTW), Pages 113-125, LNI, Vol. P-361, Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. 2025.
Abstract
With increasingly faster networks, storage disaggregation in databases enhances resource
utilization by independently scaling compute and storage nodes. Storage technologies like NVMe
SSDs provide high throughput and low latency, but maintaining these characteristics in a disaggregated
architecture poses significant challenges. NVMe-oF is a recent remote storage protocol that leverages
fast network technologies such as RDMA for efficient storage disaggregation with low access overheads.
In this paper, we present a first evaluation of the performance properties of NVMe-oF for database
workloads to guide the development of databases. Our evaluation shows that NVMe-oF can offer high
I/O performance when choosing optimal configurations for various database workloads. However, we
also show that some optimizations, such as target-offload, which minimize CPU involvement on the
storage side, are not (yet) working as expected.
