What NVMe technology features are for data centers?

NVM Express Markets

NVMe technology has become the go-to storage protocol solution for today’s data centers which were lacking full support previously. The addition of NVMe-oF technology makes NVMe solutions easier to implement than ever across the data center ecosystem. The NVMe-oF protocol allows optimal performance for both applications and the network when accessing NVMe storage via a network. By allowing the NVMe protocol to run over a switched fabric, the NVMe-oF protocol reduces bottlenecks and latency created from older storage fabric protocols. The NVM Express organization recently supported the addition of the NVMe/TCP transport to the NVMe-oF, making NVMe-oF even more flexible than before. This was in response to data center hyperscaler requests, due to their scale-out architecture choices.

Upcoming specification updates in NVMe 1.4 and NVMe-oF 1.1 also take data center hyperscaler requirements into account. New features in NVMe 1.4 specification such as I/O determinism break up each drive into multiple different devices, allowing multiple I/O workloads to independently access the drive, reducing long-tail latency and improving Quality of Service (QoS). NVMe technology data center benefits:

  • Delivery of faster overall access to data
  • Lowering of power consumption
  • Reduced latency
  • Higher Input/Output Operations (IOPS)