Seventh NVM Express Plugfest Ushers in Next Wave of NVMe and NVMe-MI Devices

NVM Express, Inc. announced that, as a result of the May 22-25 NVMe Plugfest, NVM Express has certified more than 100 market-ready products in just four years.

With testing conducted by the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), an independent provider of broad-based testing and standards conformance solutions, the event certified and named 21 NVMe products to NVMe Integrators List and six NVMe-MI devices to the NVMe-MI Integrators List.

“The successful conclusion of this event provides assurance to the OEM community of the availability of compliant and interoperable NVMe SSDs that implement the NVMe-MI specification,” said Bill Lynn, member of the board of directors, NVM Express, and engineer, server solutions division, Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies. “The NVM Express Plugfest is critical to help accelerate the adoption of the advanced management capabilities enabled by NVMe-MI. NVME-MI-enabled servers will help accelerate the adoption of the advanced management capabilities that are critical to delivering high bandwidth and low latency storage access in compute platforms.“

The NVMe Plugfest attracted 49 engineers from 16 companies, demonstrating the companies’ desire to get an early, competitive advantage by verifying interoperability, robustness, and specification compliance of offerings that take advantage of NVMe and NVMe-MI, and, through an experimental and ad-hoc testing track, NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF).

“NVMe is on a faster growth trajectory than ever before. Companies are now testing feature-rich NVMe SSDs that include unique enterprise and client capabilities and implement the NVMe-MI specification,” said David Woolf, senior engineer, datacenter technologies, UNH-IOL. “Demand for the NVMe-oF specification tracks increased, signaling to us that the industry is moving quickly from trials to real live deployments that will require conformance and interoperability testing at our next Plugfest.“

The Plugfest drew participants from enterprise, client, and cloud storage companies as well as test equipment firms looking to complete the NVMe Plugfest testing to get an early, competitive market advantage. Participants included Broadcom Limited, Cavium, Inc., Dera Storage, Intel Corporation, Lite-On Technology Corporation, Mellanox Technologies, Memblaze Technology Co., Microsemi Corporation, OakGate Technology, Realtek Semiconductor Corp., Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., SANBlaze Technology, Inc., Serial Cables, SerialTek, Teledyne LeCroy, Toshiba Corporation, Viavi Solutions Inc., and Western Digital Corporation.

“The most recent NVMe Plugfest was our first to date and we took advantage of the event’s experimental NVMe-oF specification testing,” said Rob Davis, VP, storage technology, Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. “As we continue to develop and deploy NVMe-oF offerings like our ConnectX Network Adapters and BlueField SOC, the UNH-IOL NVMe program is critical to establishing market confidence that our products will work well across a broad range of multi-vendor systems.“

The next NVMe Plugfest scheduled for the fall of 2017 at the UNH-IOL in Durham, N.H., will include testing protocols for the NVMe 1.3 specification and other updates to reflect the needs of the growing NVMe ecosystem.