The organization also announced that Revision 1.2 of the NVM Express Specification is in the final stages of ratification.
Delivering application-focused performance for data-intensive workloads, such as real-time data analytics, NVM Express over Fabrics enables end-users to connect remote subsystems with a flash appliance to achieve faster application response times and better scalability across virtual data centers. While the ability to access remote solid state drives over fabrics exists today, typically a SCSI-based protocol is used. This results in increased latency. By using NVMe end-to-end, the latency-contributing SCSI translation is eliminated, resulting in faster access to data. This provides end-users with the ability to harness the performance of hundreds of solid state drives, achieving similar latency whether the SSDs are local or remote.
An early prototype of NVM Express over Fabrics will be demonstrated at the Intel Developers Forum, September 9-11 in San Francisco. This demonstration showcases the performance and latency benefits for a flash appliance attached via Ethernet with RDMA.
"NVM Express has redefined the standard for performance of next-generation flash storage devices. EMC is working to deliver industry-leading NVMe solutions to the market, including the breakthrough DSSD™ storage system," said Mike Shapiro, Vice President, Software Engineering of DSSD, EMC Corporation and a co-author of the NVMe over Fabrics specification. "As part of that effort, EMC is pleased to be a core contributor to the definition of NVMe over Fabrics, the new NVM Express standard for sharing next-generation flash storage in an RDMA-capable fabric. NVMe over Fabrics is a key technology to enable the next generation of EMC® storage to deliver unprecedented performance to the Third Platform of IT applications."