NVM Express Member Spotlight: Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Can you provide a brief overview of your company? 

HPE is an information technology innovation company focused on technology solutions in AI, Hybrid cloud, GreenLake-as-a-Service (aaS), compute, storage, networking and data centers.

Why did your company join NVM Express?

HPE constantly monitors and focuses on market opportunities, industry trends and technology advancements that shape the future of how technology will transact. We are a leading contributor to industry specifications, initiatives and organizations that help shape the technology of tomorrow. HPE joined NVM Express because we see NVMe technology as a key protocol for the present and future of enterprise applications. Rapid advancements in NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) technology are leading to higher performance data transformations enabling Fiber Channel (FC), RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv2) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to be carried over Ethernet fabrics. This allows for broader application use and easier implementation versus traditional proprietary data center fabrics. HPE sees fostering and contributing to this technology forum as vital to solving customer, industry and technology challenges through collaboration.

What is the biggest advantage of NVM Express membership and how does your company participate?

HPE’s mission is to help guide and foster the development of NVMe architectures to ensure universal support and interoperability for advanced storage features, including security, device discovery, multi-pathing, and insuring efficiencies in transport layer performance. HPE supports the advancement of the NVM Express vision for the future by ensuring this performance architecture and protocol structure can address today’s industry challenges and the future opportunities of this technology. HPE utilizes NVM Express in industries ranging for data centers to space centers and everything in between. Helping deliver high performance and reliable solutions no matter where your workplace resides. To maximize the value HPE gets from NVM Express membership HPE participates as an officer on the Board of Directors, in the Marketing Work Group, and in multiple technical task groups developing core NVMe functionality and working with other members to improve the robustness and features of NVMe-oF devices.

What expertise does your company bring to NVM Express?

HPE has been in the IT business for more than 75 years. We offer a wide range of NVMe devices, services, and solutions based on a highly efficient NVMe-oF architecture. HPE has a unique industry view from technology hardware development to customer solution implementation. We bring expertise in multiple storage interfaces, the development and documentation of those interfaces and the deployment of them in a wide range of environments. Our history also includes using storage in test equipment and personal computers to our current day use of storage for edge-to-cloud local storage, SAN storage, and storage services. HPE has been involved in the design and development of both the interfaces and the storage systems that use them. We are also involved in and able to influence many complementary industry organizations and service a wide range of customers. Our expertise allows us to bring the requirements and use cases of those customers to NVM Express to help best serve the storage industry.

Which market segments and use cases benefit the most from NVMe technology?

Industries best suited to take advantage of NVMe technology are applications utilizing parallelism and demanding high performance like AI, Storage (Block, File and Object), Machine Learning and cybersecurity. NVMe technology has become the language of storage and many of the market segments that weren’t the early adopters are now implementing and benefiting from NVMe solutions.

Which products has your company developed using the NVMe family of specifications?

HPE develops products that incorporate all aspects of the NVMe family of specifications. The HPE product portfolio extends beyond just offering NVMe devices, it also encompasses products utilizing NVMe interfaces to products that support every transport defined by NVM Express, including NVMe over PCI Express® (PCIe®), NVMe over TCP, NVMe over RDMA, and NVMe over FC technologies. Key segments that showcase NVMe technology include storage arrays, NAS, HPC storage, AI, compute nodes, network adapters, switches and Greenlake aaS.

Which future applications of NVMe technology is your company most looking forward to?

HPE is focusing on driving NVMe-oF technology as an enterprise-class solution that provides, performance, security, network congestion control, ease of discovery, scalability and ease of deployment for demanding customer use cases and data centers.