Hybrid Event: Storage Speed Test: NVMe/TCP vs iSCSI Under Network Delay

Tyler Mealing

5.00pm - Event start

6.00pm - Event close

While existing literature widely acknowledges that Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) outperforms Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) in ideal conditions, the performance of these protocols under degraded network conditions, such as in Wide Area Networks (WANs), remains under-researched. In this talk, Tyler Mealing explores an experimental design that established a virtualised Linux environment to increase round-trip time (RTT) over baseline. Benchmarks evaluated throughput under identical conditions to isolate protocol overhead from virtualisation bottlenecks.

The session will cover:

• How iSCSI proved highly sensitive to increases in RTT, with sequential write performance dropping over 80% at 2ms additional latency.
• How NVMe/TCP maintained sequential write performance of over 700 MB/s at a latency of +9ms, ~16 times faster than iSCSI at the same increase.
• The ways NVMe/TCP’s multi-queue parallelism effectively mitigates the Bandwidth-Delay Product (BDP) limitations.
• By defining this performance envelope, the study confirms NVMe/TCP as the cost-effective enabler for high-speed Metro clusters and Disaster Recovery over standard Ethernet.

Tyler Mealing presents the basis of his final year undergraduate dissertation at Solent University. He recently completed a one-year industrial placement as a Cloud Storage Infrastructure Engineer at UBS. Working as part of the Azure Managed Storage (AMS) team, building and supporting the bank's solution for NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO).

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