NVM Express™, Inc. Addresses Industry Needs with the Creation of NVMe™ 1.4 and NVMe-oF™ 1.1 Specifications

Blog

By Amber Huffman, NVM Express, Inc. President

Our focus and diligence have come to fruition in the form of the much-anticipated release of the NVMe™ 1.4 specification, which provides faster, simpler, and easier-to-scale technology. Its counterpart, NVMe-oF™ 1.1, has entered the final member review period and will be published during September 2019. NVMe-oF 1.1 improves fabric capabilities and formally introduces NVMe/TCP to the industry. We invite you to read the full press release here.

NVMe 1.4: Creating Ease of Use Industry-Wide

The completion of the NVMe 1.4 specification would not have been accomplished without the hard work and dedication of the NVM Express, Inc. members. The specification provides improved quality of service and high availability deployments, faster performance, and scalability optimization for data centers. You may download the full NVMe 1.4 specification here.

NVMe 1.4 Specification Features:

  • Rebuild Assist simplifies data recovery and migration scenarios.
  • Persistent Event Log enables robust drive history for issue triage and debug at scale.
  • NVM Sets and IO Determinism allow for better performance, isolation, and QoS.
  • Multipathing enhancements or Asymmetric Namespace Access (ANA) enable optimal and redundant paths to namespaces for high availability and full multi-controller scalability.
  • Host Memory Buffer feature reduces latency and SSD design complexity, benefiting client SSDs.

NVMe-oF 1.1: Faster, Better Scalability for Virtual Data Centers

The NVMe-oF 1.1 specification enables the connection of remote subsystems with a flash appliance to achieve faster application response times and better scalability across virtual data centers. NVMe over Fabrics offers high transfer speeds, low latency, and access to a large ecosystem of NVMe deployments. We are looking forward to its upcoming release.

NVMe-oF 1.1 Specification Features:

  • TCP transport supports NVMe-oF on current data center TCP/IP network infrastructure.
  • Asynchronous discovery events inform hosts of addition or removal of target ports in a fabric-independent manner.
  • Fabric I/O Queue Disconnect enables finer grain I/O resource management.
  • End-to-end (command to response) flow control improves concurrency.

NVM Express, Inc. presented the NVMe 1.4 and NVMe-oF 1.1 specifications in detail during the NVM Express, Inc. hosted track at Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2019. The presentation slide decks are available for download on our website here.

Read the full press release.

View the NVMe 1.4 specification on our website: https://nvmexpress.org/resources/specifications/.