NVMe to revolutionise new storage practices

As businesses contend with the perpetual growth of data, they need to rethink how data is captured, preserved, accessed and transformed. NVMe is having a great impact on businesses and what they can do with data, particularly Fast Data for real-time analytics and emerging technologies. NVMe is more than faster flash storage – it’s also an end-to-end standard that enables vastly more efficient transport of data between storage systems and servers. NVMe is commonly used for solid-state storage, main memory, cache memory or backup memory. It provides an alternative to the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) standard and the Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) standard for connecting and transmitting data between a host system and a target storage device.

NVMe was designed for use with faster media. Architecturally, the logic for NVMe is physically stored within and executed by the NVMe controller chip that is physically co-located with the storage media, usually an SSD. NVMe technology has found its way into consumer-grade products as well in the form of external hard drives and plug-and-play memory for CPUs. Through wider adoption and economies of scale, NVMe is expected to eventually become the most cost-effective option for memory. The protocol provides a high-bandwidth and low-latency framework to the storage protocol, but with flash-specific improvements.

NVMe supports a large number of deep queues and commands per queue. It enables parallelism in multiple cores of the system while supporting the Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA). Lockless command submission and completion provides much better latency and bypasses all SCSI layers. Hyperscale data centers are the early adopters of non-volatile memory express flash, as vendors lay out plans to further flash devices and NVMe fabrics in coming years. NVMe provides Controller Memory Buffer features that allow a host to prepare commands in controller memory. That means the controller no longer needs to fetch command buffers through PCIe reads.

The NVMe arbitration mechanism improves flexibility in providing priority on a command basis for a better Service Level Agreement (SLA). The protocol enables reservations in data center applications. Major operating systems also include native NVMe driver support for ease of deployment. NVMe has many benefits compared to SATA or SCSI flash storage. Direct connection to the CPU provides lower latency compared to a connection via I/O controllers, multiplexers or storage networks.

Secondly, NVMe also provides end-to-end data protection via the Data Integrity Field/Data Integrity eXtension. Increased security has been achieved by using Enterprise, Opal and Opal light protocols from the TCG (Trusted Computing Group).

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, President & CEO, VARINDIA