NVM Express Inc., the developer for the NVMe spec for the enterprise SSDs announced that its NVMe-oF-architecture has just entered the final 45-day review that is an important step when it comes to releasing of the formal specification for the enterprise NVMe makers. NVMe-oF stands for NVMe over Fabrics a mechanism to transfer data between the host computer and targeted SSD or system over a network such as Ethernet, InfiniBand or Fibre Channel (FC). NVM Express was initially released with 1.0 specification of NVMe-oF in 2016, so the new storage solution in NVM is long overdue.
NVMe has become an important aspect in the advancement of enterprise storage because it allows the users for intra-network data sharing. It was even used by the PCI Express-based SSDs that were first used in servers that could not easily share data with another type of physical server. The SSD was basically for machine storage technology, making the moving around of the data much easier. With NVMe over Fabrics, it’s possible for a single machine to directly reach out to another for data and have it transmitted over a variety of high-speed fabrics rather than just over the Ethernet.
The NVMe-oF architecture is being designed to improve storage network fabric communications using several ways; it adds TCP transport supporting NVMe-Of on current data center TCP/IP network infrastructure. With the asynchronous discovery, events inform hosts of addition or removal of target parts in an independent fabric manner, Fabric I/Q Queue Disconnect enables finer-grain I/O resource management and an end to end flow control improves concurrency. The organizations announced that the release of the NVMe1.4 base specification with added enterprise feature described as a further maturation of the protocol. The specification in NVMe 1.4 provides important benefits such as improved Quality of Service (QoS), faster performance and improvements with higher availability for the deployments and scalability in optimizations for data centers.
