Comments on: ZFS without a Server Using the NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU

By: Tobias

Tobias — Fri, 13 May 2022 20:38:31 +0000

Did you need to set any additional mlxconfig options to get this too work?
Any other tweaks required to get the BlueField to recognize the additional NVMe devices?

By: Hans Henrik Happe

Hans Henrik Happe — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 17:25:13 +0000

Hope we will arrive at two DPUs both seeing the same SSDs. Then ZFS failover is possible and you could export ZFS block devices however you like or do an NFS export. Endless possibilities like, well, a server The real power of a DPU only comes into play when the offload funktionalitet comes into play.

By: Nils

Nils — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 07:42:09 +0000

I would like to see a test of the crypto acceleration – does it work with Linux LUKS?

By: gooberstein

gooberstein — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 05:11:32 +0000

I think that mikrotik uses an annapurna chip but its more like the ones they use for disk storage not the full Nitro cards being used today. It doesn’t have enough bandwidth for a new Nitro card.

By: Andrew H

Andrew H — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 02:15:12 +0000

Scott: Ah, just realized I misread – but yes, that’s one of the *other* primary use cases for BF2, taking remote NVMEoF / other block devices and presenting them to the host system as a local NVMe device. This is how AWS’s Nitro storage card works, they’re just using a custom card/SoC for it (the 2x25G Nitro network and storage cards use the same SoC as the the MikroTik CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe, so that could be fun…)

By: Andrew H

Andrew H — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 02:11:47 +0000

Scott: Yup! one of the BlueField-2’s primary use cases is “NVMEoF storage target” – there are a couple of SKUs explicitly designed for that purpose, which don’t need a PCIe switch or any weird fiddly reconfiguration to directly connect to an endpoint device (though it’d be a bit silly to only attach 4 PCIe 4.0 x4 SSDs to it!)