We would like to announce the integration of Accelerated Receive Flow Steering (aRFS) results into our 24.01 SPDK TCP NVMe-oF 24.01 performance report document (Mellanox ConnectX-5 Ex version). We have added data showcasing aRFS’s impact on NVMe-oF TCP performance - throughput, latency and CPU utilization.

SPDK RDMA NVMe-oF 24.01 performance report document has been published. This report presents performance results using Intel E810-CQDA2 NIC with RoCEv2 protocol enabled in the hardware setup.

SPDK 24.01 Vhost performance report document has been published.

Come and join us for the 4th SPDK Developer Meetup, hosted by Intel in the picturesque city of Gdansk, Poland!

SPDK TCP NVMe-oF 24.01 performance report documents have been published. Report documents contain results of bechmark tests carried out using two different NICs:

First part of SPDK 24.01 performance report documents is now available.

RAID 5 is a popular RAID level which, similarly to RAID 1 (mirroring), protects data in the array against failure of a member drive and can improve read performance by reading from multiple drives in parallel. It is often preferred over mirroring because it “wastes” less storage capacity - the array can have many member drives but the total available capacity is always reduced only by the size of one member. Meanwhile, RAID 1 exposes the capacity of only one member. That’s 50% in the most common two-way mirror case, which provides the same level of protection as RAID 5 - protection from failure of one drive.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 24.01 LTS!! The SPDK 24.01 release is a long term support release that will be supported for 1 year.

SPDK TCP NVMe-oF 23.09 performance report documents have been published. Report documents contain results of bechmark tests carried out using two different NICs:

SPDK 23.09 Vhost performance report document has been published.

SPDK RDMA NVMe-oF 23.09 performance report documents have been published. Report documents come in different flavors, using different NICs and protocols for NVMe-oF target to NVMe-oF initiator connections:

SPDK 23.09 performance report document for SPDK NVMe Bdev has been published.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 23.09!!

SPDK 23.05 performance report document for SPDK Vhost has been published.

SPDK TCP NVMe-oF 23.05 performance report documents have been published. Report documents contain results of bechmark tests carried out using two different NICs:

SPDK RDMA NVMe-oF 23.05 performance report document has been published. This report presents performance results using Intel E810-CQDA2 NIC with RoCEv2 protocol enabled in the hardware setup.

SPDK RDMA NVMe-oF 23.05 performance report documents have been published. Report documents come in different flavors, using different NICs and protocols for NVMe-oF target to NVMe-oF initiator connections:

SPDK 23.05 performance report document for SPDK NVMe Bdev has been published.

Welcome to the third and final post in our series on SPDK as IPU firmware! In part 1 we discussed the addition of memory domains and in part 2 we focused on avoiding data copies for crypto and on address translation. So let’s pick up from there.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK v23.05!

Welcome to the second post in our series on SPDK as IPU firmware. The previous post laid the groundwork for using SPDK on an IPU. Now we’re going to focus on enabling inline, block-level encryption in a more efficient way. If it isn’t fresh in your mind, take a moment to review our example scenario from the last post. We’ll start from there.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK v23.01.1.

Fuzzing is a software testing technique that incorporates feeding random, unexpected input to a computer program to test unexpected paths of software execution. The SPDK project uses two approaches to fuzz testing:

Welcome to the first post in a new series on SPDK as IPU firmware. For those not familiar with the term Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU), these are PCIe cards attached to a host system that offload “infrastructure” work, usually for a cloud or hyper-converged service provider. In terms familiar to SPDK developers, these cards typically have some hardware that’s capable of presenting what appear to be physical NVMe or virtio-blk/scsi devices to the host system, but then may forward any I/O sent to that device over the network.

SPDK TCP NVMe-oF 23.01 performance report document has been published. This report contains results of benchmark tests carried out using Intel E810-CQDA2 NICs.

SPDK TCP NVMe-oF 23.01 performance report document has been published. This report contains results of benchmark tests carried out using Mellanox ConnectX-5 Ex NICs.

SPDK v23.01 added a new ublk library that can expose SPDK block devices as Linux kernel block devices using the Linux ublk framework added in the Linux 6.0 kernel. The Linux kernel doc for ublk describes ublk as:

The SPDK project has a team of core maintainers who are responsible for providing technical oversight for the SPDK project, including final review and merging of patches into the SPDK code base. As the SPDK project continues to grow, the core maintainer team also needs to grow by adding contributors who are already demonstrating technical skill and leadership within the project. SPDK has seen increased interest in orchestration, especially the SPDK CSI Kubernetes plugin, so we are pleased to announce that Yibo Cai and Antti Kervinen are joining the core maintainer team with a specific focus on the spdk-csi project. Yibo and Antti will be responsible for helping define and refine the architecture and design for spdk-csi, as well as being primary reviewers for all incoming patches.

SPDK RDMA NVMe-oF 23.01 performance report documents have been published. Report documents come in different flavors, using different NICs and protocols for NVMe-oF target to NVMe-oF initiator connections:

SPDK 23.01 performance report documents for SPDK NVMe Bdev and SPDK Vhost have been published.

In 2013, Intel started the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) project to reimagine the storage software stack. Although NVMe was still in its infancy, organizations integrating NVMe SSDs recognized the challenges they faced as the performance and efficiency of the storage software became increasingly critical to overall system performance. When Intel kicked off the SPDK Open-Source Community in 2015, a global phenomenon was born that was laser-focused on demonstrating the outstanding performance and efficiency enabled by running software designed for NVMe devices. In the beginning, the community demonstrated that it’s possible to build systems capable of millions of IOPS (I/O operations per second) using standard hardware. However, when solid-state media based on technologies like the Intel® Optane™ arrived, a whole new class of NVMe SSDs with higher throughput and an order of magnitude reduction in hardware latency the community saw an opportunity to redesign the SPDK NVMe driver. In 2019, a new SPDK NVMe driver capable of over 10 million IOPS (using a single CPU core!) was released and accompanied by a blog with deep technical insights on the techniques SPDK employs to achieved great performance. But the SPDK community is about both performance and scalability, so in 2021 we demonstrated a system that scaled to 80 million IOPS. We’re kicking off 2023 with another mind-blowing accomplishment.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 23.01 LTS!! The SPDK 23.01 release is a long term support release that will be supported for 1 year.

Thank you all for attending the SPDK PRC Virtual Forum. We had a very successful Virtual Forum this year with awesome content and presenters. You can download the presentations using the links below. Please note these are static PDFs, but many of the presentations made extensive use of animations, so something may be lost in translation.

The recently introduced spdk_spinlock offers safety and debugging improvements over pthread_mutex_t.

Save The Date

SPDK RDMA NVMe-oF 22.09 performance report document has been published. This report document version uses Mellanox ConnectX-5 Ex NICs for NVMe-oF target to NVMe-oF initiator connections.

Introduction

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 22.01.2 LTS. Due to DPDK vhost CVE fixes users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

Thank you all for attending the SPDK Virtual Forum. We had a very successful Virtual Forum this year with awesome content and presenters. You can download the presentations using the links below. Please note these are static PDFs, but many of the presentations made extensive use of animations, so something may be lost in translation.

SPDK TCP NVMe-oF 22.09 performance report documents have been published. This time the report comes in two flavors, using different NICs for NVMe-oF target to NVMe-oF initiator connections:

SPDK 22.09 performance report documents for SPDK NVMe Bdev and SPDK Vhost have been published.

Save The Date

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 22.09!!

Introduction

Performance report document for SPDK NVMe Bdev 22.05 release has been published.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 22.05!!

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 22.01.1 LTS. Due to DPDK vhost CVE fixes users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

New version of 22.01 SPDK NVMe Bdev performance report document has been published. Updated version presents performance results measured using new PCIe Gen4 platform: Supermicro SYS-220U-TNR with Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6348 Ice Lake and twenty two Kioxia(R) KCM61VUL3T20 Gen4 NVMe drives.

SPDK Vhost 22.01 performance report document has been updated with Vfio-User update.

We are excited to announce the SPDK Community Hackathon will be held virtually on April 28th,2022 8am to 12:30pm PDT. Hackathon will be focused on NVMe vfio-user - Overview of the architecture, its threat model, and how to improve and extend testing (including fuzzing) of the SPDK nvme vfio-user target stack. REGISTER today to collaborate with other community developers for technical and interactive discussions.

SPDK NVMe Bdev and NVMe-oF RDMA 22.01 performance report documents have been published.

SPDK TCP NVMe-oF and SPDK Vhost 22.01 performance report documents have been published.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 22.01 LTS!! The SPDK 22.01 release is a long term support release that will be supported for 1 year.

Introduction

SPDK Continuous Integration system provides functional test results for patches submitted at https://review.spdk.io. These tests however, do not provide information about the impact of submitted changes on SPDK's overall performance. Because of that, we decided to make performance regression test results available for the community. The tests are scheduled to run roughly every two hours using the most recent SPDK code base available on master branch. Result are presented using Grafana dashboards containing information about IOPS, Bandwidth and Latency (along with visual representation) are available on https://performance.spdk.io.

Thank you all for attending the SPDK, PMDK and Intel® Performance Analyzers PRC Online Forum. We had a very successful Online Forum this year with awesome content and presenters. You can download the presentations using the links below. Please note these are static PDFs, but some of the presentations made use of animations, so something may be lost in translation.

The SPDK project has a team of core maintainers who are responsible for providing technical oversight for the SPDK project, including final review and merging of patches into the SPDK code base. As the SPDK project continues to grow, the core maintainer team also needs to grow by adding contributors who are already demonstrating technical skill and leadership within the project. So we are pleased to announce that we are adding Konrad Sztyber to the core maintainer team!

Performance report document for SPDK NVMe Bdev 21.10 release has been published.

Performance report document for SPDK NVMe-oF TCP 21.10 release has been published.

Performance report document for SPDK NVMe-oF RDMA 21.10 release has been published.

Performance report document for SPDK Vhost 21.10 release has been published.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 21.10!!

Recently, in the v21.07 release, SPDK got support for BPF tracing. It consists of a set of scripts and static probes defined within the SPDK libraries giving the user yet another way to inspect SPDK-based applications. SPDK already had a tracing library, called libtrace, for a long time. BPF tracing isn’t supposed to replace it, but rather complement it. Both have slightly different capabilities - libtrace has significantly lower overhead, but is less flexible. BPF traces, on the other hand, are more costly (they require a kernel trap), but are more robust and can even be attached dynamically, without having to define the probes in code.

Performance report document for SPDK NVMe Bdev 21.07 release has been published.

Performance report document for SPDK NVMe-oF TCP 21.07 release has been published.

Performance report document for SPDK NVMe-oF RDMA 21.07 release has been published.

Performance report document for SPDK Vhost 21.07 release has been published.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 21.07!!

Performance report documents for SPDK 21.04 release have been published.

Thank you all for attending the SPDK, PMDK and Intel® Performance Analyzers Virtual Forum. We had a very successful Virtual Forum this year with awesome content and presenters. You can download the presentations using the links below. Please note these are static PDFs, but many of the presentations made extensive use of animations, so something may be lost in translation.

Save The Date

The adoption of NVM Express® SSDs in the data center is unleashing performance that was unprecedented just a few years ago. Since the inception of the SPDK project, the community has demonstrated that it’s possible to build systems capable of tens of millions of IOPS (I/O operations per second) using commodity hardware. Over the last couple of years, we have demonstrated systems capable of over 10 million IOPS (using a single CPU core!), but now we’re ready to significantly advance the state of the art. Yes, 80 Million IOPS.

We’re excited to announce support for NVMe over vfio-user, a technology that allows SPDK to present fully emulated NVMe devices into virtual machines. Virtual machines can leverage their existing NVMe drivers to communicate with the devices and data is transferred efficiently to or from SPDK using shared memory. In other words, just like vhost-user but able to emulate NVMe devices instead of virtio-blk or virtio-scsi devices.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 21.04!!

New performance report for SPDK NVMe Bdev has been published.

New performance report for SPDK Vhost has been published.

In SPDK’s 21.01 release spdk_top received a few improvements that we’re excited to share.

New performance report for SPDK NVMe-oF TCP and SPDK NVMe-oF RDMA have been published.

We’re excited to announce that SPDK has its very own symbol:

Yes, it really does say Windows and SPDK in the same sentence! It is now possible to experiment with SPDK on Windows.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 21.01.1 LTS.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 21.01 LTS!!

New performance report for SPDK NVMe Bdev has been published.

New performance report for SPDK NVMe-OF RDMA has been published.

New performance report for SPDK NVMe-OF TCP has been published.

New performance report for SPDK Vhost has been published.

Thank you all for attending the 2020 PRC SPDK, PMDK and Intel® VTune™ Profiler Virtual Forum. We had a very successful Virtual Forum this year with awesome content and presenters. You can download the presentations using the links below. Please note these are static PDFs, but many of the presentations made extensive use of animations, so something may be lost in translation.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 20.10!

New performance report for SPDK NVMe-oF TCP has been published.

Several companies have recently published whitepapers referencing SPDK.

New performance report for SPDK NVMe-oF RDMA has been published.

New performance report for SPDK Vhost has been published.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 20.07!

Thank you all for attending the SPDK, PMDK and Intel® VTune™ Amplifier Virtual Forum. We had a very successful Virtual Forum this year with awesome content and presenters. You can download the presentations using the links below. Please note these are static PDFs, but many of the presentations made extensive use of animations, so something may be lost in translation.

New performance report for SPDK NVMe-oF has been published.

New performance report for SPDK Vhost has been published.

New performance report for SPDK NVMe-oF RDMA has been published.

New performance report for SPDK NVMe-oF TCP has been published.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the releases of SPDK 20.01.2 LTS and SPDK 20.04.1!

New performance report for SPDK NVMe-oF TCP has been published.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 20.04!

A new application has just joined SPDK family - spdk_top. Designed to resemble standard top, spdk_top provides additional insight into SPDK cores, lightweight threads, and pollers. Have you ever wondered which core is used most by your SPDK instance? Are you building your own bdev or library and want to know if your code is running efficiently? Are your new pollers busy most of the time? You can check that now with spdk_top and tune your implementation with the provided information to get even more from SPDK!

New performance report for SPDK Vhost has been published.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 20.01.1 LTS!

We are rescheduling the SPDK, PMDK and VTune™ Profiler Summit for later in 2020 due to the continued concern over the spread of the coronavirus.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 20.01!

New performance report for SPDK NVMe-oF RDMA has been published.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 19.10.1!

The SPDK project has a team of core maintainers who are responsible for providing technical oversight for the SPDK project, including final review and merging of patches into the SPDK code base. As the SPDK project continues to grow, the core maintainer team also needs to grow by adding contributors who are already demonstrating technical skill and leadership within the project. So I am pleased to announce that we are adding Alexey Marchuk to the core maintainer team!

New performance report for SPDK NVMe-oF TCP has been published.

New performance report for SPDK Vhost has been published.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 19.10!

New performance reports for SPDK NVMe-oF TCP transport and for Vhost have been published.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 19.07.1!

Thank you all for attending the SPDK, PMDK and Intel® VTune™ Amplifier PRC Summit. We had a very successful summit this year with awesome content and presenters. You can download the presentations including opening, keynotes, technical sessions and hands on labs using the links below. Please note these are static PDFs, but many of the presentations made extensive use of animations, so something may be lost in translation.

Come and join the 3rd annual SPDK Developer Meet-up, this year hosted by Nutanix in beautiful San Jose, CA! It’s an excellent opportunity for networking, learning, coding, and generally strengthening the community. We’ll be covering all sorts of topics so there’s sure to be something for everyone!

The SPDK project has a team of core maintainers who are responsible for providing technical oversight for the SPDK project, including final review and merging of patches into the SPDK code base. As the SPDK project continues to grow, the core maintainer team also needs to grow by adding contributors who are already demonstrating technical skill and leadership within the project. So I am pleased to announce that we are adding Tomasz (Tomek) Zawadzki to the core maintainer team!

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 19.07!

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 19.04.1!

Yes, you’re reading that right. That’s 10.39 MILLION 4KiB random read I/O operations per second on a single thread. Mind blown? Don’t believe it? This blog post will explain exactly how we’ve done it.

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 19.04!

Thank you all for attending the SPDK, PMDK and Intel® VTune™ Amplifier Summit. We had a very successful SPDK summit this year with awesome content and presenters. You can download the presentations using the links below. Please note these are static PDFs, but many of the presentations made extensive use of animations, so something may be lost in translation.

The official OpenStack Stein release has been announced and for the first time it includes new SPDK Cinder target and volume drivers. This adds support for SPDK NVMe-oF target in OpenStack. Details about the OpenStack Cinder Block Storage service release can be found in the release notes and detailed documentation on drivers can be found in the SPDK Cinder drivers documentation.

Performance report for SPDK 19.01.1 NVMe-OF has been published in the Documentation section on www.spdk.io. SPDK 19.01.1 NVMe-oF Performance Report

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 19.01.1!

An introduction to the SPDK and its coming availability to Oracle Linux was published on Oracle’s Linux blog site. This will be the first Linux distribution that packages SPDK!

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 19.01!

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 18.10.1!

NVM Express has ratified TCP as a new transport for NVMe-oF! The announcement can be found here. Quoting from the NVM Express announcement:

We have been doing some work to evaluate the performance of SPDK and gain some hands-on experience with the SPDK NVMe-oF Target and Initiator. The Hitachi SPDK NVMe-oF Performance Report contains our test configuration and performance results. In summary, we observed up to 8x more IOPS/Core with SPDK NVMe-oF Target and Initiator, vs the Linux Kernel, and a 90% reduction in the software latency. Many thanks to John Kariuki and the SPDK team.

The SPDK project has a team of core maintainers who are responsible for providing technical oversight for the SPDK project, including final review and merging of patches into the SPDK code base. As the SPDK project continues to grow, the core maintainer team needs to grow as well. With that in mind, I am pleased to announce that we are adding Dariusz (Darek) Stojaczyk to the core maintainer team!

On behalf of the SPDK community I’m pleased to announce the release of SPDK 18.10!

This year NetApp hosted the SPDK Developer Meetup in beautiful Sunnyvale CA on 10/16 and 10/17. HUGE thanks to John Meneghini and the rest of the NetApp crew. We had community members from all over the world present with a record breaking attendance of over 30 developers!

The following SPDK 18.04 Performance Reports have been published in the Documentation tab on www.spdk.io.

Intel and Packet are working together to bring free infrastructure for testing and benchmarking with Intel® Optane™ SSDs to the developer community. This community lab is a perfect fit for the SPDK community that cares about getting the most from their storage applications. Interested in testing your SPDK application on the world’s most responsive data center SSD? Head over to Accelerate with Optane for more information, and, once you’re ready, request access. The lab will provide you with a highly capable bare metal server powered by Intel Xeon® Scalable processors, with three 750GB Intel Optane™ SSD DC P4800X and one 4TB Intel SSD DC P4500 for comparison purposes.

Come and join the 2nd annual SPDK Developer Meetup, this year hosted by NetApp in beautiful Sunnyvale CA! It’s an excellent opportunity for networking, learning and making forward progress on the code and generally making the community more productive. We’ll be covering all sorts of topics but a major theme this year will be NVMeOF (including FC support) so if you’re interested in these topics you won’t want to miss this meet-up.

Here is a recap of 2018 SPDK Summit at the beautiful Dolce Hayes Mansion, San Jose on May 15th and 16th. We had a successful event and achieved all of our goals. Thanks to the dedication and support of many contributors and great participation from SPDK community members.

All the videos from the 2018 SPDK PRC Summit are located here. Brief introduction about these videos are also included in the same folder.

Thank you all for attending the SPDK PRC Summit held at March, Beijing, China. We had a very successful SPDK summit this year with awesome content and presenters.

Thank you all for attending the SPDK Summit. We had a very successful SPDK summit this year with awesome content and presenters.

Today, the SPDK team is proud to announce the v18.04 release.

As the SPDK code base has been growing, so has the collection of test scripts used by the automated build pool to perform continuous integration testing. The SPDK test bed is comprised of a hierarchy of bash scripts which make calls to example applications (located under spdk/examples) and tools written for testing (located under spdk/test). By running these test scripts and aggregating the results, the SPDK automated test pool helps contributors identify code errors or continuous integration issues introduced by their patches.

SPDK Community meetings are open to everyone and all are encouraged to participate. Here are the details:

When submitting a new unit test, it’s not necessary to worry too much about how long the test takes because there’s no real hardware involved so the unit tests execute super-fast.

The SPDK team is proud to announce the v18.01 release.

The SPDK project has a team of core maintainers who are responsible for providing technical oversight for the SPDK project. I am pleased to announce that we are adding Shuhei Matsumoto and Changpeng Liu to the core maintainer team!

The SPDK team is proud to announce the v17.10 release, as well as the v17.10.1 release (see below for details on the changes between v17.10 and v17.10.1). This release adds a major new feature, Logical Volumes.

This week members of the growing SPDK Community met for the first ever SPDK Developer Meetup. Engineers from Massachusetts, Arizona, California, Washington, China, Japan and the United Kingdom all came together in Chandler, AZ, to meet for 2 days of discussions on everything from NVMe to vhost to the community test strategy, roadmap and upcoming improvements.

Performance Report section has been added under Documentation tab on www.spdk.io.

It’s going to be awesome! Although we’re now at capacity, please feel free to email Paul and we’ll make sure we do everything we can to accommodate you.

Come and join the very first SPDK Developer Meetup! It’s an excellent opportunity for networking, learning and making forward progress on the code and generally making the community more productive. There won’t be any presentations at this meeting, instead be prepared for the following types of activities:

The SPDK team is proud to announce the v17.07 release. This release incorporates a number of ease-of-use improvements and API cleanups.

Videos from the Intel Builders Developers Summit featuring SPDK and ISA-L held in Santa Clara on April 19th and 20th are posted here.

Please note these are static PDFs, but many of the presentations made extensive use of animations, so something may be lost in translation. There will be video available soon; links will be added in a separate post.

Today, the SPDK team is proud to announce the v17.03 release. This release features two significant new sets of components which will unlock a broader set of use cases for SPDK.

Meet with key contributors to SPDK, learn details about the latest and upcoming SPDK ingredients, and participate in roundtable discussions that will shape the SPDK community. The two day event also includes introductions to adjacent software libraries and opportunities for informal networking and private discussions.

Today we have released SPDK 16.12. This release contains the following major additions since our last release:

Much has already been said about NVMe over Fabrics. It was first publically demonstrated in 2014 and the 1.0 specification is finally complete. In essence, NVMe over Fabrics (NVMf) is the NVM Express* (NVMe) block protocol tunneled through an RDMA fabric, and it has enormous potential to enable the next generation of datacenter storage development. To support broad adoption of NVMf, the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) has created a reference user-space NVMf target implementation for Linux, released for community involvement via GitHub under BSD license. In parallel, community-based Linux* kernel efforts have created both a host and a target under GPL license. All three of these implementations are now released with the final 1.0 specification as of June 8, 2016.

Solid-state storage media is in the process of taking over the data center. Current-generation flash storage enjoys significant advantages in performance, power consumption, and rack density over rotational media. These advantages will continue to grow as next-generation media enter the marketplace.

Over the last month, the API of the NVMe driver in SPDK has changed significantly. First, on behalf of the SPDK team, I’m sorry for breaking any existing code! SPDK is still in its infancy, so dramatic API changes will be a fact of life for the next few months. By the end of the year, we’d like to have a plan in place to manage future API changes in a more formal way. Second, I’d like to take a few moments to explain what changes were made and why we made them. I’ll stick to a mostly high level overview of the API changes for now, but we hope to produce some additional blog posts that detail each one in the future.

The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) provides a set of tools and libraries for writing high performance, scalable storage applications. It achieves high performance by moving all of the necessary drivers into userspace and operating in a polled mode instead of relying on interrupts. It is primarily designed to be leveraged by OEMs and cloud service providers to optimize their storage solutions. Generally, guidelines from the related networking project DPDK should be followed. Specifically, their guide for writing efficient code almost all applies to SPDK.