Industry Expert Blogs

Recent weeks have yielded several developments that signal increasing support for NVMe. Product announcements, OS support, and test-community support are all signs of growth for NVMe, the interface protocol for non-volatile memory (NVM)-based storage technology aimed at enabling the full potential of PCI Express SSDs.

End users have been anticipating NVMe storage since the 2012 release of the NVMe 1.1 specification. Dell recently announced that PowerEdge R920 server would have support for up to 8 1.6 TB NVMe drives. Specifically, those are 2.5” SFF-8639 form factor SSDs from Samsung. Dell and Samsung were early promoters of the NVMe Express Organization (formerly NVM Express Working Group) so it’s not surprising to see this product announcement among the first NVMe products being commercially available.

An additional sign of increasing adoption and growth for NVMe is greater operating system support. Early on, only a few reference drivers were available, and these had to be digitally signed (if Windows) or compiled into the kernel (Linux). Those early steps paved the way for greater support today.

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