Newly Released Versions of DMTF Redfish® and SNIA Swordfish™ Specifications Include NVMe™ and NVMe-oF™ Specification Enhancements

News Press Release

Details Presented During SNIA Storage Developer Conference 2020

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. and BEAVERTON, Ore. and PORTLAND, Ore., Sept. 21, 2020 – The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), NVM Express and  DMTF announced today the newly released SNIA Swordfish™ storage management specification version 1.2.1 and the 2020.3 release of DMTF Redfish® provide functionality to ensure NVM Express™ (NVMe™) and NVMe™ over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) technology environments can be managed entirely by Redfish and Swordfish.

SNIA Swordfish and Redfish together now provide comprehensive management of servers, storage and fabrics including NVMe and NVMe-oF technology environments. Developed by the open industry consortium NVM Express, the NVMe-oF specification currently supports fabric transports like RDMA (iWARP, RoCE, IB), TCP, and Fibre Channel. NVMe and NVMe-oF specifications currently lack efficient remote configuration and provisioning management mechanisms to enable NVMe-oF technology scaling to large converged infrastructures – something Redfish and Swordfish can provide.

“It’s rewarding to see the timely results of SNIA’s collaboration with DMTF and NVM Express,” said Richelle Ahlvers, Storage Management Architect, SNIA Board Member and Chair of the SNIA group developing Swordfish. “It was clear from the outset that we shared the same purpose – making it easy for IT administrators, DevOps, and others to integrate NVMe and NVMe-oF devices into everything from single-system through enterprise scale-out management ecosystems.”

Features included in the newest versions of Redfish and Swordfish to ensure NVMe and NVMe-oF technology environments can be managed comprehensively include:

  • Concepts and enhancements to the Redfish and Swordfish models and schema to support the management of NVMe and NVMe-oF devices and systems
  • Detailed technical mapping between NVMe specifications and the Redfish and Swordfish schemas, providing guidance to implementers
  • Mockups of multiple configurations within Redfish and Swordfish ecosystems to show examples
  • User guide content specific to NVMe architecture instances

“We’re proud to have developed the fabric and storage extensions for NVMe-oF architectures, a major component of the Redfish 2020.3 release,” said Jeff Hilland, DMTF President. “Through our three-way alliance partnership, SNIA and NVM Express provided critical feedback and additions to these extensions enabling a holistic management experience for NVMe-oF technology environments.”

NVMe technology continues to become more and more popular because of its low latency and high throughput. Technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and IoT continue to advance, and the need for increased performance continues to grow. The industry has been advancing external connectivity options using NVMe-oF architecture.

“We are pleased that NVMe and NVMe-oF technologies have become fully integrated into the SNIA Swordfish and DMTF Redfish specifications, indicating a shared investment in the continued advancement of the larger technology ecosystem,” said Amber Huffman, NVM Express president. “Due to this industry collaboration, we are able to usher in the fast speed, scalability and efficiency of the NVMe and NVM-oF specifications across many data demanding markets.”

Storage industry experts are presenting more information on SNIA Swordfish and DMTF Redfish at the virtual SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) Sept. 22-23 including:

  • NVMe and NVMe-oF Technology Configuration and Manageability with Swordfish and Redfish
  • What’s New in SNIA Swordfish
  • Redfish Ecosystem for Storage
  • A free Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session to discuss next steps for adoption

To access the full slate of informative sessions at SDC 2020, please register for $95 here.

About SNIA
The Storage Networking Industry Association is a not-for-profit global organization, made up of member companies spanning the global storage market. SNIA’s mission is to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting standards, technologies, and educational services to empower organizations in the management of information. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education, and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For more information, visit www.snia.org.

About NVM Express
With more than 100 members, NVM Express, Inc. is a non-profit organization focused on enabling broad ecosystem adoption of high performance and low latency non-volatile memory (NVM) storage through a standards-based approach. The organization offers an open collection of NVM Express (NVMe™) specifications and information to fully expose the benefits of non-volatile memory in all types of computing environments from mobile to data center. NVMe-based specifications are designed from the ground up to deliver high bandwidth and low latency storage access for current and future NVM technologies. For more information, visit http://www.nvmexpress.org.

About DMTF
DMTF creates open manageability standards spanning diverse emerging and traditional IT infrastructures including cloud, virtualization, network, servers and storage. Member companies and alliance partners worldwide collaborate on standards to improve the interoperable management of information technologies. DMTF is a 501(c)(6) standards organization led by a diverse board of directors from Broadcom Inc.; Cisco; Dell Technologies; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Hitachi, Ltd.; HP Inc.; Intel Corporation; Lenovo; NetApp; and Software AG.  For more information visit https://www.dmtf.org/.