NVM Express® (NVMe™) - Non-Volatile Memory Express is a communications interface/protocol developed specially for SSDs. Designed to take advantage of the unique properties of pipeline-rich, random access, memory-based storage, NVMe reduces latency and provide faster CPU to data storage device performance.

Enterprise NVMe servers are optimised for many I/O intensive enterprise applications such as advanced data mining, online transaction processing (OLTP), and financial transactions that were previously not possible to achieve with standard SAS3 and SATA3 SSD storage. These NVMe enabled servers utilise the high bandwidth and low latency of NVMe SSDs to significantly improve the performance and storage efficiency of these applications.

Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabrics( NVMe-oF), is designed to enable NVMe message-based commands to transfer data between a host computer and a target solid-state storage device or system over a network such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel, or InfiniBand.

One of the main differences between standard NVMe and NMVe-oF is the method in which commands and responses are dealt with. NVMe-oF uses a message-based model to communicate between a host and target storage device, while local NVMe maps commands and responses to shared memory in the host over the PCIe interface protocol.

There are several use cases for NVMe over Fabrics. For example, storage systems comprised of many NVMe devices, using NVMe over Fabrics with an RDMA or Fibre Channel interface, making a complete end-to-end NVMe storage solution. This system would provide extremely high performance while maintaining the very low latency available via NVMe.

Taking into account new Ethernet and InfiniBand speeds, its suffice to say, NVMe-oF will play a major role in dramatically improving the performance of existing storage network applications and accelerating the adoption of new and future storage architectures.

Contact BIOS IT for more information on our range of NVMe optimised solutions today.