NVM Express, Inc. has announced significant updates and engineering change notices across its 11 NVMe specifications, targeting intensified requirements across Artificial Intelligence, cloud, enterprise, and client storage environments. This comprehensive refresh introduces new features and revisions designed to support rapidly evolving storage workloads and innovative deployment models in the data center.
The revised suite encompasses the NVMe 2.3 Base Specification, a slew of command set specifications, and enhancements to transport and management interface protocols. Notable updates within the command set series include NVM Command Set 1.2, Zoned Namespace (ZNS) Command Set 1.4, Key Value Command Set 1.3, Subsystem Local Memory Command Set 1.2, and Computational Programs Command Set 1.2. These advanced command sets enable more granular control, flexibility, and scalability for diverse storage applications, underpinning efficient data access patterns and in-storage computational capabilities desired by next-gen applications.
Transport protocols also see meaningful upgrades, with the new NVMe over PCIe Transport 1.3, NVMe over RDMA Transport 1.2, and NVMe over TCP Transport 1.2 standards accelerating data movement between storage and compute nodes whether on-premises or in remote cloud scenarios. Management is addressed with the NVM Express Management Interface (NVMe-MI) 2.1 Specification, which advances device monitoring and maintenance. The NVMe Boot 1.3 Specification ensures robust and secure system initialization processes. Collectively, these enhancements are positioned to sustain the rigorous throughput, latency, and reliability needs of modern data-intensive workloads, establishing NVMe as a principal enabler of next-generation storage solutions.
