NVMe-oF – Non Volatile Memory Express over Fabric – provides radically lower access latency to block data in shared storage array than either SATA or SAS. It extends the NVMe protocol to shared, external arrays using a network transport such as lossless Ethernet, with RoCE, and InfiniBand, with iWARP.
Running NVMe-oF across a TCP/IP transport adds 80 – 100 microseconds of latency compared to ROCE and iWARP, but the net result is much faster than iSCSI or Fibre Channel access to an external array; think <200µs compared to >100,000µs.
