Software-defined storage (SDS) has become a rapidly growing industry trend. Remote storage systems are managed with a software-defined network responsible for replication and backup among other tasks to virtualize the storage network. This network can be improved via hardware with FPGAs to attain near native SSD latency, throughput, and IOPS despite being remote storage systems. With non-volatile memory express (NVMe*) over PCIe*, SSD bandwidths reach nearly 3X or 4X better performance than over SAS/SATA respectively. This FPGA solution the Intel offers utilizes NVMe* over RoCE, where Intel® FPGAs can act as both the host interface and the storage controller necessary in the SDS network, improving storage structures with native latencies for remote SSDs.

In RoCE implementations, storage area networks offload server network responsibilities to the FPGA relieving both CPU workloads and memory. With RoCE, server-to-server data storage transfer does not require the CPU and the process can be implemented with very low network latencies. In doing so, CPU memory buffers can be freed up for more pressing processing needs, improving the overall functionality of the servers.