Non-Volatile Memory Express. Non-volatile memory standard is a specification of SSD using PCI-E channel.

It was reported that NVM Express Inc. announced the release of the basic specification of NVM Express 1.4, while NVMe over Fabrics1.1 specifications have entered the final 45 day membership review. Gregory Wong, analyst of Forward Insight, said that the shipment of NVMe technology products would be above SAS and SATA.

NVMe full name is Non-Volatile Memory Express. Non-volatile memory standard is a specification of SSD using PCI-E channel. NVMe has fully utilized the low latency and parallelism of PCI-E SSD at the beginning of its design, as well as the parallelism of contemporary processors, platforms and applications. The parallelism of SSD can be fully utilized by the host hardware and software. Compared with AHCI standard, NVMe standard can bring many performance improvements. In 2011, NVMe standard was officially published.

The latest NVMe 1.4 architecture can provide faster, simpler and easier expansion technology, while NVMe-OF 1.1 architecture improves architecture communication and officially introduces NVME / TCP to the industry. The current generation of NVMe SSDs, such as Samsung 970 Evo plus, and even the new NVMe SSDs supporting PCIe 4.0, such as Corsair force series MP600, all use NVMe1.3 specifications. Therefore, we can expect NVMe 1.4 to have a higher speed.

NVM Express organization introduction and members

“The adoption of NVMe technology continues for all computing sectors, with NVMe technology products expected to exceed SAS and SATA shipments by 2019,” said Gregory Wong, analyst at forward insights. “The NVMe1.4 specification demonstrates the efforts and capabilities of industry leaders to work together to improve flash storage across the data center.” NVMe 1.4 further matures the NVMe technology infrastructure and supports the storage industry in various market segments including cloud, enterprise and customer. The specification provides important benefits, such as improved quality of service, faster performance, improved high availability deployment, and scalability optimization in the data center, enabling fast, simple, and scalable storage.

From the function of NVMe 1.4 specification, Rebuild Assist simplifies data recovery and migration scheme. Persistent event log provides powerful drive history for problem classification and large-scale debugging. NVM set and IO determinacy allow better performance, isolation and quality of service. Multi-path enhanced or asymmetric namespace access provides the best and redundant path for namespace to realize With high availability and complete multi controller scalability, the host memory buffer function can reduce latency and SSD design complexity, thus benefiting the client SSD.

The features of NVMe-OF 1.1 specification

• TCP transport supports NVMe-OF on the current data center TCP / IP network infrastructure.
• asynchronous discovery events notify the host to add or remove target ports in a fabric independent manner.
• fabric I / O queue disconnect enables finer I / O resource management.
• end to end which is also called command to response flow control improves concurrency.

NVM Express, Inc. will introduce the new NVMe 1.4 specification and the pending NVMe-OF1.1 specification in detail in a speech hosted by NVM express in 2019 at the flash Summit held in Santa Clara, USA from August 6 to 8, 2019. More information about NVMe 1.4 and previous NVMe specifications can be found on the NVM express website.