NVM Express™ Participates in the First NVMe™ Technology Industry Event

By Jonmichael Hands, NVM Express Marketing Co-Chair

2018 was a huge year for NVMe™. NVMe SSD shipments now make up the majority of SSD revenue and capacity shipments, and some analysists are showing that the industry average ASP of NVMe is now equivalent of SATA, driven by hyperscale deployments. It was also a huge year for NVMe development, with the announcements of NVMe-MI™ 1.1 and NVMe-oF™ 1.1, and disclosing over 22 new technical proposals that have been ratified towards the next core NVMe spec.

This month, Conference ConCepts, Inc. (you likely know them for hosting the Flash Memory Summit) hosted NVMe Developer Days, the inaugural industry event targeted at hardware and software designers, storage specialists, product planners and storage engineers focused on the ins-and-outs of NVMe technology. NVM Express, Inc. served as an organizational sponsor and many of our members made up the crowd of over 200 attendees.

I saw sessions and engagement from tier 1 tech companies such as Intel, Micron, Toshiba Memory, Samsung, WD, Facebook, Microsoft, Microchip, Broadcom, Mellanox, Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE, IBM, and Google. With so much expert content, we expect this event may pick up in the future. As Gary Hilson of the EE Times stated: “You know you’ve made it when you get your own show.”

The event kicked off with a keynote from Michael Cornwell, General Manager, Storage Technologies, Azure Hardware Infrastructure, Microsoft. He said something that really stuck with me.

“NVMe is a transport”

How I interpreted that is that NVMe will be everywhere: powering the backbone of the largest data centers in the world, in consumer notebooks and desktops, workstations, and scaling down to mobile devices. NVMe is completely open for innovation.

I had the pleasure of presenting at two sessions along with fellow NVM Express members. I shared our NVMe specification roadmap and discussed the new features being added to the next revision of the NVM Express specification, projected to be complete in early 2019. We have exciting new features for hyperscale to drive improved quality of service at scale, manageability and security features for enterprise storage, as well as expanding the core spec for fabrics use. My second session highlighted the great development in open source manageability and performance tools for NVMe, including NVMe-cli, NVMe RAID, and optimizing Linux performance for high performance NVMe SSDs. In my opinion, NVMe has eclipsed legacy storage protocols for the flexibility of management and deployments with powerful open source and community driven software, drivers, and ecosystem.

Peter Onufryk, NVMe-MI Workgroup Chair, officially announced that the NVMe-MI 1.1 specification is in ratification. The updated specification will standardize NVMe enclosure management, provide the ability to access NVMe-MI functionality in-band and deliver new management features for NVMe subsystem SSD deployments.

NVM Express member David Black discussed where NVMe technology will be heading in the next five years. The plans include adding more diversity in NVM media and I/O functionality, integrating NVMe-MI over NVMe-oF and focusing NVMe-oF on enhance management, orchestration and automation.

If you were unable to attend the event, you can find all of the presentations from NVMe Developer Days on their website.

NVM Express, Inc. plans to continue to evolve with the perpetual growth of data and have a great impact on businesses in need of faster, scalable storage. According to Jillian Coffin of TechTarget, “the advent of NVMe will expand the addressable flash and broader storage markets and 27 percent of companies have plans for formal evaluations of NVMe over the next 24 months.”

On behalf of NVM Express, Inc., I wish everyone a happy holiday season and look forward to sharing future progress and milestones with you.