FCIA Collaborating With NVM Express

Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) announced a new workgroup within the INCITS T11 Committee that will align FC fabric connectivity using the upcoming NVM Express Over Fabrics standards specification.
 
The INCITS T11 Committee efforts will contribute and align to the new standards specification development activities to ensure enterprises can trust storage devices based on NVMe over Fabrics to seamlessly co-exist alongside the installed base of FC storage fabrics.
 
“Storage fabrics based on FC are the world’s most widely deployed solution, currently supporting the vast majority of mission-critical and data intensive workloads and applications,” said Mark Jones, president, FCIA. “We are eager to begin our work to enable NVMe-based storage solutions to seamlessly co-exist alongside the massive existing and expanding installed base of FC enterprise storage fabric infrastructures, including both solid-state and traditional disk arrays.“
 
NVMe is the optimized, high performance, scalable host controller interface designed for NVM based storage. It was designed initially for PCIe based solid-state storage devices and is now being extended for use over fabrics by the NVM Express, Inc.http://www.nvmexpress.org/, standards organization.

The NVMe protocol was created for data-intensive workloads that require the faster performance inherent in flash-based appliances and solid-state storage arrays. The focus of the NVMe over Fabrics initiative is to extend the new solid-state storage connectivity protocol to robust fabric solutions, ones that deliver faster application response times and better scalability for virtual data centers.
 
“NVMe has redefined the standard for performance of solid-state storage devices and NVMe Over Fabrics extends its value to shared infrastructures,” said Amber Huffman, president, NVM Express, Inc. “We are excited about the FCIA’s participation and collaboration on the definition of NVMe over Fabrics.”
 
FCIA also recently launched a Knowledge Vault designed to be a resource for IT executives who are interested in learning more on how FC can deliver business value. It’s a repository of professional videos and an assortment of collateral that reinforces why FC is the purpose-built and proven network infrastructure for storage, engineered to meet the demands of enterprise data centers.