NVM Express, Inc. Elects Facebook and Toshiba to Board

Micron, Microsoft, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital Re-elected

WAKEFIELD, Mass.-- January 17, 2017 -- NVM Express, Inc., the organization that developed the NVM Express specification for accessing solid-state drives (SSDs) on a PCI Express (PCIe) bus, today announced the results of its recent board elections. Elected to Promoter positions were Facebook, Micron, Microsoft, Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. Facebook and Toshiba are new to the Promoter level, and the others are incumbents. The election winners join existing Promoters Cisco, Dell EMC, Intel, Microsemi, NetApp and Oracle, whose current terms expire at the end of 2017.

Representatives from the 13 Promoter companies form the NVM Express, Inc. Board of Directors, which governs the organization, including setting strategic direction. All Contributor and Promoter member companies are eligible to run for Promoter positions, where there are elections each year for roughly half the positions.

"We're very pleased to welcome Toshiba and Facebook to the NVM Express, Inc. Board, to help shape the future direction of NVM Express technology and the organization," said Amber Huffman, NVM Express President. "In 2016, we marked major milestones, such as publishing the NVM Express over Fabrics specification. We look forward to publishing revision 1.3 in the first half of this year – with much more to come later in 2017."

"Toshiba is honored to join the NVM Express Promotor group of companies. We look forward to working with the other industry leaders on the Board of Directors to set the future direction for the NVM Express standard. Joining the NVM Express Board of Directors and becoming a Promotor company underscore Toshiba's commitment and significant investment in the future success of NVM Express," said Jeremy Werner, SSD Vice President Marketing and Product Planning, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc.

"The creation of high-bandwidth and low-latency storage is important to scaling our infrastructure, and we need to create standards around non-volatile memory devices that are constantly evolving. We're thrilled to join the NVM Express Board of Directors and be part of this already successful process. By coming together, we will all have a much greater impact," said Chris Petersen, Hardware Systems Technologist at Facebook.

About NVM ExpressTM

NVM Express (NVMeTM) is an open collection of specifications and information to fully expose the benefits of non-volatile memory in all types of computing environments from mobile to data center. NVMe is designed from the ground up to deliver high bandwidth and low latency storage access for current and future NVM technologies. The NVM Express specifications include:
• NVM ExpressTM – the register interface and command set for PCI Express attached storage with industry standard software available for numerous operating systems
• NVM Express Management Interface (NVMe-MITM)– the command set and architecture for out-of-band management of NVM Express storage (e.g., discovering, monitoring and updating NVMe devices using a BMC)
• NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oFTM)– the extension to NVM Express that enables tunneling the NVM Express command set over additional transports beyond PCIe. NVMe-oF Fabrics extends the benefits of efficient storage architecture at scale in the world's largest data centers by allowing the same protocol to extend over various networked interfaces.

NVM Express specifications are developed and owned by the NVM Express, Inc. non-profit organization. The organization consists of more than 100 member companies that are focused on enabling broad ecosystem adoption of high performance and low latency NVM storage through a standards-based approach.