NVM Express Workgroup Holds First Plugfest

The NVM Express Workgroup, developer of the NVM Express(NVMe) specification for accessing SSDs on a PCIe bus, held its first Plugfest at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab in Durham, NH, May 13-16, 2013.

This event provided an opportunity for participants to measure their products’ compliance with the NVMe specification and to test interoperability with other NVMe products.

The NVMe specification defines an optimized register interface, command set and feature set for PCIe-based SSDs. NVM refers to non-volatile memory, as used in SSDs.

The goal of NVMe is to unlock the potential of PCIe SSDs now and in the future, and to standardize the PCIe SSD interface.

Participating in the Plugfest were Agilent Technologies, Dell Inc., Fastor Systems, Inc., HGST, a Western Digital company, Integrated Device Technology, Inc., Intel Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., SanDisk Corporation., sTec, Inc., and Western Digital Corporation.

"The NVMe Plugfest is an important component of ensuring a robust implementation of the interface specification," said Kevin Phipps, director, server storage engineering, Dell. "Working closely with UNH-IOL, ongoing collaborations will assure interoperability and tighten the NVMe specification. For end-users, this translates to more choices and a lower cost of doing business."

"NVMe was designed from the ground up to enable non-volatile memory to better address the needs of enterprise and client systems. This Plugfest highlights the rapid development and maturity of the NVMe specification and the surrounding infrastructure as well as supporting PCIe SSD devices," said JH Lee, VP, flash memory product planning and enabling, Samsung.

"As a leading SSD provider to data center, enterprise and client systems, Intel believes that this Plugfest is an important milestone in delivering NVMe SSDs to the market," said Rob Crooke, corporate VP and GM, Intel non-volatile memory (NVM) solutions group. "The availability of interoperable NVMe PCIe SSDs accelerates innovation in the systems and architectures that are built with them. By standardizing the PCIe interface, the NVMe specification is enabling the industry to deliver higher performance PCIe SSDs, allowing businesses to bring together applications and systems to transform their data usage."