NVMe Gets Refactored

Flourishing features have been partitioned out of base specification

By Gary Hilson, EETimes (June 30, 2021)

The non-volatile memory express (NVMe) specifications are getting restructured.

While maintaining backward compatibility with previous generations, NVMe 2.0 allows for faster and simpler development in what has become an increasingly diverse device environment that has expanded to include hard disk drives (HDDs). NVM Express president Amber Huffman said rearchitecting NVMe is all about meeting the evolving demands of the future of storage. It also encourages the development of independent command sets such as Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) and key value (KV) as well as enabling support for the various underlying transport protocols common to NVMe and NVMe-of Is Ready to Go the Distance.

What started out as a working group is now a full-fledged organization that maintains a library of specifications that comprises multiple documents including the base specification, as well as command set, transport, and management interface specifications. The NVMe device ecosystem spans enterprise and client solid-state drives (SSDs), removable cards, compute accelerators, and hard disk drives (HDDs).

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