Posted on: October 1, 2012
FreeBSD® recently added NVM Express drivers for PCI Express® (PCIe®)-based Solid State Drives (SSDs) to its Enterprise repertoire. Intel's Jim Harris was the primary author of the drivers with contributions from EMC's Joe Golio. The addition of NVM Express drivers positions FreeBSD as a leader of Enterprise solid-state storage technology solutions. The commit is located at http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=240616. The drivers provide an NVM Express hardware abstraction layer, an NVM Express consumer which exposes namespaces as GEOM disks, and NVM Express management utilities.
Posted on: September 24, 2012
Back from a great week at the 2012 Intel Developers Forum (IDF) in San Francisco.
Posted on: September 21, 2012
Sumit Puri of LSI, Steve Sardella of EMC, and myself had the pleasure of recording an audio podcast on NVM Express for Intel Chip Chat. Each of us gave our view on NVM Express and the advantages it brings to the industry and our companies individually. We also had the horror of listening to our own voices.
Posted on: September 18, 2012
We attended VMWorld, and there was lots of buzz and some tremendous IT & business networking opportunities with 15,000+ attendees! VMWorld attendees are a mix of IT technical professionals and business decision-makers from organizations of all sizes, representing a wide range of industries. I co-presented an NVM Express Smart Talk in the Solutions Pavilion along with Li Zhou, VMware Staff Engineer. To a standing room only audience, Li discussed how VMware supports the goals of the NVM Express initiative. NVMe is relevant to virtualization because NVMe SSDs can be used in existing products to increase the VM density (data can be swapped to SSD).
Posted on: September 5, 2012
San Francisco… the city by the bay… What could be more perfect than that? How about 14 NVM Express members in one Showcase community…
Posted on: September 5, 2012
Finally getting caught up after 3 days at Flash Memory Summit. Rather than posting a normal summary of the event, two of the NVM Express members decided to take a different approach and provide observations through the eyes of someone new to the Storage market and through the eyes of a seasoned veteran.
Posted on: August 23, 2012
This week IDT introduced the industry’s first NVMe enterprise flash controllers! This is exciting news, as IDT’s new programmable flash controllers enable SSD developers to…
Posted on: August 20, 2012
So it’s time for Flash Memory Summit (FMS) again and like in years past, I am getting ready to head out to the…
Posted on: August 3, 2012
PCI Express Solid State drives are quickly outrunning the capabilities of existing IO architectures. The SSD Form Factor Working Group has been defining a new…
Posted on: June 12, 2012
PCIe SSD’s are delivering some amazing performance numbers, which means customers are getting very high bandwidth and performance with low latency compared to other interfaces like SATA and SAS SSD’s. The one drawback that PCIe SSDs have is the traditional card form factors which comes in HHHL (half height, half length) or the even bigger form factor a FHHL (full height, half length). To add or swap these cards in a traditional server, you have to power down the server (basically taking it out of commission) and open up the server box and very carefully add or remove additional cards. This can be a problem for a cloud or database environment where servers are in full utilization. Plus, there are exposed components, and the form factor itself isn’t very rugged so it requires careful handling.
