NVM Express and VMWorld

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).

VMware is also taking other new storage initiatives that make use of SSD. NVMe SSDs will enable datacenter customers to scale performance across multiple cores to quickly and efficiently access big data.

Intel is collaborating with VMware on a base driver for a future release of vSphere®. The base driver will support any compliant NVMe SSD from any vendor, removing the qualification expense and burden. We’re also investigating a native driver supporting vendor specific extensions. For near term solutions, check out our VMware’s IOVP program to learn more.

The show was a blast, and Bon Jovi wound things up with a great performance!

Christopher Saleski
Initiatives Manager
Storage Technologies Group, Intel Corp.