Simplifying NVMe® Device Scale-Up in Data Center Storage Management with SNIA Swordfish®

By: Phil Cayton, Principal Engineer at Intel and Co-Chair of the NVM Express Boot Task Group

AI and HPC workloads offer extremely efficient, scalable and intelligent computation processes capable of enabling modern enterprises to meet the rapid demands of today’s customers. As companies continue to find new and innovative ways to bolster their enterprise and hyperscale data centers, multiple challenges pop up including costly hardware, hardware maintenance, and hardware configuration and provisioning as infrastructure complexity increases. So how can you meet the increasing management overheads of these new workloads? Enter the Swordfish standard.

With the support of NVM Express and DMTF, SNIA has developed the SNIA Swordfish® Specification to simplify these processes and make scaling up your architecture easier. In this blog, I’ll cover how Swordfish and NVM Express® (NVMe®) technologies work together, the benefits of using Swordfish to manage NVMe devices, and how this technology can help upgrade your data center to the next level.

SNIA Swordfish Specification: Enhancing NVMe Device Management Processes

The Swordfish Specification, developed by SNIA, in cooperation with the DMTF and NVM Express, provides a standards-based RESTful (REST) API interface that can seamlessly manage NVMe for enterprise and hyperscale data center clients. The specification supports the management of multiple NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) devices in individual platforms or across multiple systems. Using Swordfish to maintain NVMe devices, data center architects can easily establish and expand their ecosystem to support the increased data requirements of modern data centers. The SNIA Swordfish specification simplifies the deployment of NVMe devices in a standardized way by providing easy access to device configuration, provisioning, management, and security.

Swordfish enhances the existing benefits of NVMe technology by allowing data center architects and implementers to effectively deploy and configure scale-out data center architecture. With the influx of heavy workloads in data centers due to AI and HPC applications, system managers need to add storage devices to their framework to meet the expansive needs of these applications. Using Swordfish, data centers can easily upgrade their infrastructures with NVMe devices to support these applications. They can also manage all aspects of NVMe devices across NVMe-oF transports, more efficiently combining networking and storage.

Important Benefits of the SNIA Swordfish Specification in the Data Center

Data center architects working in large-scale, dynamic heterogeneous hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments would experience benefits such as Swordfish support for the deployment, configuration, provisioning, monitoring and security of NVMe devices. In addition, Swordfish works in conjunction with DMTF Redfish® instrumentation to support the effective management of data center servers and all the individual components on those servers, including storage and networking devices.

Learn More About SNIA Swordfish

To learn more about how SNIA Swordfish enhances the benefits of NVMe technology, I encourage you to visit the Swordfish page on the SNIA website. I also invite you to view my recent video on the subject, which you can find on the NVM Express YouTube channel.