NVMe the nextGen Interface for Solid State Storage

Today SSD drives are severely hamstrung by the way they are attached to servers via switches and HBAs introducing severe hits on latency. To operate at its full capabilities to deliver 1 million IOPs to keep a multi-core CPU busy, it needed an interface that is not mediated through a disk drive gateway of a switch or HBA. Now a new generation of two separate interfaces - NVM Express and SCSI over PCIe are being introduced direct attach of SSDs to PCIe – which portend to radically improve the latency and power consumption compared to existing SATA/SAS interfaces while eliminating the need for HBAs or switches thus savings system cost. Major OSs like Windows, Linux and ESXi.are starting to ship host drivers to support the new interfaces. Some 80 companies varying from Computer Systems to Storage and Chip manufacturers are on board embracing the new NVMe/SOP Direct Attach SSD interfaces

Learning Objectives

The presentation will cover how the previous generation of SSDs were being attached to servers, how the new PCIe Direct Attach SSD architectures are being implemented, quantify the performance advantage being achieved by Servers, the power and cost reductions achieved, status of standards and feature sets