New Promoter Group at NVMHCI Work Group for PCIe SSDs

The NVMHCI Work Group, the creators of the NVM Express Specification, announced the creation of a new promoter’s group. The new multi-member promoter group will direct the organization’s activities and focus on enabling and driving broad adoption of the NVMe Standard.

"The move to make the NVMHCI Work Group more open and collaborative can only help support best-of-breed approaches to deploying IT solutions," said Paul Prince, CTO of the Enterprise Product Group at Dell. "This specification will help drive new innovative, high-performance storage solutions based on a standard interface that everyone can leverage. In fact, we are incorporating this technology into our next generation of PowerEdge servers."

"The integration of solid state storage technology will have a profound impact on computer architectures over the next few years," said David Dale, director of Industry Standards at NetApp. "Broadened support for the NVMHCI Work Group will help Solid State become an ubiquitous component of server and enterprise storage, enabling companies like NetApp to innovate at the system level and deliver unprecedented value to customers."

The new board will have thirteen seats, with opportunities for participation across a broad spectrum of the industry involved in the creation and development of PCIe non-volatile memory-based storage devices. Board seats are filled by both invitation and election. The number of seats allows for participation by a representative group of industry leaders from both large and small organizations. The new NVMHCI Work Group Promoter’s Agreement also helps pave the way for establishing industry organizational collaboration.

"EMC is the leader in providing SSDs to the market in enterprise storage systems, and believes standards are in the best interest of the industry," said Bill DePatie, vice president of Hardware Engineering at EMC. "EMC supports the NVMe Work Group’s innovation and its collaboration across standards bodies to advance SSD capabilities and effectively provide alignment of new and existing standards."

"PCIe-based SSDs deliver unmatched performance, while at the same time reducing system power and latency by directly attaching to the host bus. IDT is proud to be collaborating with other industry leaders to define NVM Express, enabling broader adoption of PCIe SSDs. We believe the new organizational structure of NVMe Work Group will further enhance the level of cooperation," said Mario Montana, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Computing Division at IDT.

Seven permanent board seats were created and filled by invitation. Six seats are open and will be filled by elections held yearly. This structure allows for stability and continuity as well as flexibility and adaptability to changes in the industry and participants in this technology segment.

The seven companies that will hold permanent seats on the board are Cisco, Dell, EMC, IDT, Intel, NetApp, and Oracle. The other six seats will be elected from companies who are members of the NVMHCI Work Group.

A New Standard
That Unlocks the Potential of PCIe on SSDs
The NVM Express 1.0 specification, developed cooperatively by more than 80 companies from across the industry, was released on March 1, 2011 by the NVMHCI Work Group; now more commonly known as the NVMe Work Group. The NVM Express 1.0 specification defines an optimized register interface, command set and feature set for PCI Express SSDs. The goal is to help enable the broad adoption of solid-state drives (SSDs) using the PCIe interface.

The significant advances in performance enabled by non-volatile memory-based storage technology, as embodied in PCI Express SSDs, has demanded the surrounding platform infrastructure evolve to keep pace and allow the system to realize the potential of these devices. A primary goal of NVM Express is to provide a scalable interface that unlocks the potential of PCIe SSDs now and into the future.

To download 1.0 specification