NVMe Technology in the Real World

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00:05 Ross Stenfort: Hi, welcome to NVMe in the Real World. I'm Ross Stenfort at Facebook, and today we're going to talk about how NVMe really looks in the real world. I know oftentimes I throw these specs and documents and lots of different papers about many things. But today, let's look about how this hardware really works and how it benefits us today.

So, let's start by talking about Facebook at scale. Today, Facebook has 1 billion users on Instagram, 1.3 billion on Messenger, and all total 3.1 billion users use a Facebook product every month. That's a lot of people. And they depend on NVMe for storage, to make sure that we have the most optimal experience for every user. That's very important. As you know, when you use one of our products, you want the very best experience. And that is something we're determined to make happen.

01:01 RS: Here, you see one aisle in one data center. And you see there's a lot of hardware sitting there. Now with that, if we continue on here, well, what are these buildings look like? Facebook, as you can see, has built data centers across the world, and this is to ensure that our users get the best experience possible. When you look at these data centers, they're roughly four football fields in length. And they're housed with hardware of all shapes and sizes to ensure that everybody has the best experience. And that's a lot of people being affected by that. Now, let's talk about next-generation form factors and E1.S. E1.S, what's really great about it is with the same PCB and firmware, it's a diverse family of thermal options for the market. There's a high-density 5.9 millimeter all the way to the highest performance at low-airflow 25 millimeter E1.S. And what's really great about this is, it's a single PCB firmware and it's just a thermal option that gets added on to the drive.

02:10 RS: So, depending on what you build, you have great flexibility, as of course, performance scaling with PCIe Gen 5 and beyond. Hot plug is excellent for both storage and compute and 1OU and has a very broad market support, as you can see by some of the drives at the bottom of this picture. Now, let's talk about scalable and efficient NVMe platforms. If we start here, on the left, you see the 25 millimeter E1.S latch. This is really great. As you can imagine, when you have lots of hardware in a data center, it's really hard to maintain. So, we want to make sure it's really easy. So, by having a nice flexible latch, you can pull the drive out when it fails, push it back in really fast, really easy. It's very convenient for maintaining your data center.

03:00 RS: Then, as you can see on the left, there's a 4OU chassis with one 1OU blades. On the right, there is a 2OU chassis with 2OU blades. As you can see, these chassis are 4OU high and they support very dense storage. If you look down here at the table, you see the max blade capacity for the 1OU blade is 64 terabytes and for the 2OU blade platform it's 96 terabytes. This leads to 768 terabytes for the 1OU blade platform and 576 terabytes for the 2OU blade platform. In addition to that, they're very efficient. The CFM per watt is very low, making it very good for the environment.

03:50 RS: Now, what do hyper-scales care about NVMes? What are the requirements? If you go to open compute, you'll see the NVMe cloud SSD specification. A link to the specification is below. This is a joint effort between Facebook and Microsoft and spec'ing what are the NVMe requirements and why do we need and how do things need to work. And for more details about that, let's talk about that.

This document is roughly 70 pages of requirements -- what's needed to build an NVMe cloud SSD includes requirements from NVM Express, PCI Express, smart logs, reliability, thermal, power, security, form factors, everything you need to successfully build an NVMe cloud SSD is covered in this document. And that makes it very convenient to know exactly what you need to do. And with that, Facebook, we're building innovative and highly efficient data centers using NVMe technology. And I want to thank you very much for listening today, and hope you have a great time at Flash Memory Summit. Thank you.