A customer wants to boost performance on a budget without new FC infrastructure. They want low-latency block storage over Ethernet. Which protocol satisfies this?

• A. iSCSI
• B. NVMe/FC
• C. NVMe/TCP
• D. SMB Multichannel

Answer: (C)

Delivering NVMe-level performance over Ethernet by running NVMe over TCP is the right approach. NVMe is a fast, low-latency protocol designed for flash storage, and extending it over fabrics provides high performance across a network. Using the TCP transport over standard Ethernet lets you leverage existing infrastructure without the cost of a Fibre Channel (FC) network, meeting the budget constraint while still delivering low latency and high IOPS.

Why this fits better than the alternatives: iSCSI uses the SCSI command set over IP, which adds translation and overhead that can increase latency compared to NVMe over TCP. NVMe over Fibre Channel would require FC hardware and fabric, not Ethernet, conflicting with the desire to avoid new FC infrastructure. SMB Multichannel, while useful for increasing throughput in file sharing, does not provide block-level storage protocols, so it won’t meet the requirement for low-latency block storage over Ethernet.