FMS 2024: NVM Express Specs To Unify AI, Cloud, Client, and Enterprise Storage

NVM Express, Inc. announced 3 new specs and 8 updated specs.

This update to NVMe technology builds on the strengths of previous NVMe specs, introducing significant new features for modern computing environments while also streamlining development and time to market.

“Beginning as a single PCIe SSD specification, NVMe technology has grown into nearly a dozen specs, including multiple command sets, that provide pivotal support for NVMe technology across all major transports and standardize many aspects of storage,” said Peter Onufryk, NVM Express technical workgroup chair. “NVMe technology adoption continues to grow and has succeeded in unifying client, cloud, AI and enterprise storage around a common architecture. The future of NVMe technology is bright and we have 75 new authorized technical proposals underway.”

NVM Express Specs Target Streamlined Development
The latest NVMe specs consist of multiple documents targeted at allowing faster and simpler development of NVMe architecture. The 3 new specs are the NVMe Boot specification, the Subsystem Local Memory command set and the Computational Programs command set. The updated specns are the NVMe 2.1 Base spec, Command Set specs (NVM Command Set, ZNS Command Set, Key Value Command Set), Transport specs (PCIe Transport, FC Transport, RDMA Transport and TCP Transport) and the NVMe Management Interface spec.

Key New NVMe Capabilities

• Enabling live migration of PCIe NVMe controllers between NVM subsystems.
• New host-directed data placement for SSDs that simplifies ecosystem integration and is backwards compatible with previous NVMe specs.
• Support for offloading some host processing to NVMe storage devices.
• A network boot mechanism for NVMe-oF.
• Support for NVMe-oF zoning.
• Ability to provide host management of encryption keys and highly granular encryption with Key Per I/O.
• Security enhancements such as support for TLS 1.3, a centralized authentication verification entity for DH-HMAC-CHAP, and post sanitization media verification.
• Management enhancements including support for HA out-of-band management, management over I3C, out-of-band management asynchronous events and dynamic creation of exported NVM subsystems from underlying NVM subsystem physical resources.

The NVM Express specs and the new feature specs are available for download on the NVM Express website.

The NVM Express sponsored presentation track was on August 7 at FMS 2024.