NVM Express Inc. today released the NVM Express (NVMe) 1.4 Base Specification and announced that NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) 1.1 specification has entered into final 45-day member review.

NVMe 1.4 architecture provides faster, simpler, and easier-to-scale technology, while NVMe-oF 1.1 architecture improves fabric communication and formally introduces NVMe/TCP to the industry.

“NVMe technology adoption continues across all computing segments, with the number of NVMe gigabyte shipments expected to surpass SAS and SATA combined in 2019,” said Gregory Wong, Analyst, Forward Insights1. “The NVMe 1.4 specification demonstrates the efforts and capabilities of industry leaders cooperating to improve flash storage across the data center.”

“The release of the NVMe 1.4 specification has been highly anticipated, as the new enterprise features and NVMe-oF 1.1 innovations are greatly beneficial for Dell EMC and the industry-at-large,” said Robert Hormuth, Vice President & Fellow, Chief Technology Officer, Server & Infrastructure Systems, Dell EMC. “The extreme scale and performance needs of the modern enterprise and cloud data centers are driving rapid adoption of NVMe technology. Customers can expect to benefit from many of the features in the NVMe 1.4 specification including enhanced security, superior congestion management and unique transport capabilities.”

NVMe 1.4 further matures the NVMe technology infrastructure, while enabling the storage industry across market segments including cloud, enterprise and client. The specification provides benefits such as improved quality of service (QoS), faster performance, improvements for high availability deployments, and scalability optimizations for data centers.

NVMe 1.4 Specification Features:

• Rebuild Assist simplifies data recovery and migration scenarios.
• Persistent Event Log enables robust drive history for issue triage and debug at scale.
• NVM Sets and IO Determinism allow for better performance, isolation, and QoS.
• Multipathing enhancements or Asymmetric Namespace Access (ANA) enable optimal and redundant paths to namespaces for high availability and full multi-controller scalability.
• Host Memory Buffer feature reduces latency and SSD design complexity, benefiting client SSDs.

NVMe-oF 1.1 Specification Features:

• TCP transport supports NVMe-oF on current data center TCP/IP network infrastructure.
• Asynchronous discovery events inform hosts of addition or removal of target ports in a fabric-independent manner.
• Fabric I/O Queue Disconnect enables finer grain I/O resource management.
• End-to-end (command to response) flow control improves concurrency.

NVM Express, Inc. will present the new NVMe 1.4 specification and the pending NVMe-oF 1.1 specification in detail during the NVM Express, Inc. hosted track at Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2019 on August 6-8, 2019 in Santa Clara, CA. Sessions cover a range of topics including driver updates, reference designs, NVMe-oF transports, and performance considerations. View the current schedule.