NVMe over Fabrics (oF) Specification (historical reference only)

Historical Reference

The NVMe® over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) specification was created to enable non-volatile memory express commands that transfer data between a host and SSD or system over a networked fabric.

The first NVMe-oF 1.0 specification was released in June 2016 and extended NVMe technology to additional transports beyond PCIe, such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Infiniband and RDMA. The NVMe-oF 1.1 specification, released in 2019, added finer grain I/O resource management, end-to-end flow control, support for NVMe/TCP and improved fabric communication.

The NVMe-oF 1.0 and 1.1 specifications offer lower latency, improved management and provisioning of flash storage, remote storage access and the ability to disaggregate compute and storage. As hyperscale data centers may often have up to thousands of servers and storage arrays, these groundbreaking features have a significant impact on ROI and overall performance.

No further development of the NVMe-oF specification is planned. For the NVMe 2.0 specifications, look for this content in the NVM Express Base specification.