Welcome to NVM Express

It is an exciting time for NVM Express.  After 18 months of development in collaboration with 80 companies, the specification was published on March 1^st.  Now is the time for prototypes leading into product! 

To evaluate the scalability of the interface, Intel has developed an NVM Express prototype that uses DRAM as a backing store (rather than NAND).  The thrilling result was over 1 Million IOPs with only 8 queues on a mainstream Sandy Bridge based four core i7 2600k.  The workload was 512B random reads, aligned to 4KB.  This is satisfying proof to the many contributors to the NVM Express specification that the interface will provide the scalability necessary for the evolution of NVM over the next 10 years.