NVM Express, Inc. has released the NVMe 1.3 specification, which adds capabilities that meet the needs of enterprise, cloud, and client market segments, including Virtualization and Streams.

NVM Express is the organization that developed the industry standard NVM Express (NVMe) specification for accessing solid-state drives (SSDs) on a PCI Express (PCIe) bus as well as across Fabrics (e.g., Ethernet, InfiniBand, Fibre Channel)

The reach of the interface has expanded its support for the Mobile sector by adding the Boot Partitions feature, which enables bootstrapping of an SSD in a low resource environment. These features have been added while maintaining low latency and high performance - making an NVMe device ready to take advantage of next generation bus speeds, including PCIe 4.0. The NVM Express 1.3 specification is available now for download.

The NVMe 1.3 specification introduces over ten new features, serving various market segment needs. The majority of capabilities are optional. New features include Sanitize, Virtualization, and Streams. Sanitize offers a simple, fast, native way to completely erase data in an SSD, allowing more options for secure SSD reuse or decommissioning. Virtualization provides more flexibility with shared storage use cases and resource assignment, enabling developers to flexibly assign SSD resources to specific virtual machines. Streams offers better endurance for NAND-based SSDs using simple tagging of associated data from different tenants in cloud hosting applications.