FMS 2018 Recap: NVMe is Eclipsing SATA Shipments

By Amber Huffman

Members of NVM Express, Inc. have recently returned from sunny Santa Clara, where we attended yet another Flash Memory Summit. The event was devoted to providing the storage community with the latest technology updates, forecasts, and roadmaps for non-volatile memory—but it also indicated that NVM Express is more prominent than ever and is continuing to grow.

As we toured the exhibit hall, NVMe technology was everywhere; over 50 member companies displayed proud member signs and demoed their groundbreaking solutions. I am humbled to have received the inaugural SuperWoman in Flash Leadership Award, largely due to my work in leading the NVM Express, Inc. organization and in participating in the development of our extensive NVMe specification library. NVM Express has been and continues to be a team effort with us collectively delivering the transformation that continues in Enterprises, Cloud Datacenters, and all of our laptops with NVMe technology.

NVM Express, Inc. partnered with Flash Memory Summit to host a presentation track centered on NVMe education. Our sessions covered a range of timely topics including driver updates, reference designs, and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) transports and performance considerations. You can view the presentation slides and video recordings on our website.

Driving Towards the Future
During our NVMe roadmap presentation, we announced that NVMe-oF 1.1 and NVMe-MI 1.1 are targeted for release at the end of 2018. The updated NVMe-oF specification will include enhanced discovery and TCP transport binding. The NVMe-MI 1.1 specification will add SES Based Enclosure Management, NVMe-MI In-band and storage device enhancements. NVMe 1.4 is on the horizon for 2019 and will introduce highly demanded additions like IO Determinism, Persistent Memory Region and Multipathing.

Beyond our maturing specifications, products are appearing in a range of markets, like client, enterprise and cloud. In fact, NVMe SSDs in GBs shipped have started to surpass Serial ATA (SATA) SSDs in GBs shipped, as it did at Intel last quarter. The work of NVM Express, Inc. to develop this technology has truly been a group effort and we predict continued market advancement in 2019 and beyond.

Thank you to everyone who attended our session tracks and met with us at FMS 2018! If you want to stay up to date on all of the latest specification announcements, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter.