Everything You Need to Know About the NVMe® 2.0 Specifications and New Technical Proposals

NVM Express, Inc. recently announced the release of the NVM Express® (NVMe®) 2.0 family of specifications. The NVMe 2.0 specifications were restructured to: enable faster and simpler development of NVMe solutions, and to support the increasingly diverse NVMe device environment.

The extensibility of the specifications encourages the ongoing enhancements of independent command sets like Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) and Key Value while enabling support of the various underlying transport protocols common to NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) architectures. The NVMe 2.0 specifications also add support for new media types like rotational media. Finally, they maintain backwards compatibility with previous NVMe architecture generations.

Read more about how the NVMe 2.0 specifications restructured to improve clarity and ease of use for developers.

Notable New NVMe 2.0 Specification Features

The NVMe 2.0 family of specifications will benefit the client, cloud and enterprise markets. Namely due to the inclusion of several important new features like Zoned Namespaces (ZNS), Key Value, Endurance Group Management and more.

The ZNS specification provides a zoned storage device interface that allows the SSD and host to collaborate on data placement. ZNS permits data to be aligned to the physical media of the SSD, which improves overall performance and reduces device cost, while also increasing the capacity that can be made available to the host.

The NVMe Key Value (NVMe-KV) Command Set provides access to data on an NVMe SSD namespace using a key as opposed to a logical block address. The NVMe-KV command set allows users to access a variable sized value (e.g., an object) using a key without the overhead of the host maintaining a translation table that defines an object as a sequence of logical block addresses.

Rotational media support has been added to enable use of NVM Express by Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). This includes updates to features, management capabilities and other enhancements required for HDD support.

NVMe Endurance Group Management enables media to be configured into Endurance Groups and NVM Sets. This exposes granularity of access to the SSD and improved control.

Learn More About the NVMe 2.0 Specifications

To learn more about the NVMe 2.0 family specifications and newly released TPs, we invite you to watch NVMe Technical Work Group Chair Peter Onufryk’s new video detailing the benefits of the newly released TPs and NVMe Base specification. Watch the video on our YouTube channel.

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