Over the last few years, flash has been giving a much-needed shot in the arm to the performance of datacenter primary storage. The emerging NVMe standard and its networking variant, NVMe over fabric, are direct consequences of the flash revolution. Together, they are delivering another jolt to storage performance and driving more changes in the industry.
So far, flash usage has been dominated by the serial-attached SCSI (SAS) and SATA drive interfaces. SAS and SATA were designed for use with mechanical disk drives, and as a result, they prevent the full performance of flash from being realized. Their replacement with an interface that was designed expressly for drives powered by flash and future storage-class memories was inevitable. NVMe is that replacement, and it provides a major boost to performance. Adoption of NVMe flash drives within servers is now significant and growing; widespread take-up in all-flash arrays (AFAs) is beginning. NVM Express, the same widely backed cross-vendor body that produced NVMe, also developed the NVME over fabric (NVMe-oF) standard to deliver a performance boost in storage networks.
This Technology & Business Insight report on the NVMe flash development and adoption is based on information received from briefings with vendors, end-user conversations, industry conferences and quantitative analysis from 451 Research services, including Voice of the Connected User Landscape (
The full report includes:
- The Benefits of NVMe and all-flash arrays
- The New Developments
Spured by NVMe - The Current Flash Offerings in the Market
- The Outlook for SCMs