NVM Express Releases 1.3 Specification

Today NVM Express, Inc. announced that it has completed and has released its NVMe 1.3 specification. NVM Express made a commitment to Enterprise, Cloud, and Client customers and it has delivered on that commitment by adding capabilities that meet specific needs of the above markets as well as Virtualization and Streams. NVM Express also expanded the reach of the interface to the Mobile sector by adding the Boot Partitions feature, which enables bootstrapping of an SSD in a low resource environment.

Today NVM Express, Inc. announced that it has completed and has released its NVMe 1.3 specification. NVM Express made a commitment to Enterprise, Cloud, and Client customers and it has delivered on that commitment by adding capabilities that meet specific needs of the above markets as well as Virtualization and Streams. NVM Express also expanded the reach of the interface to the Mobile sector by adding the Boot Partitions feature, which enables bootstrapping of an SSD in a low resource environment.

Flash storage is really taking off and NVMe is a big part of that trend with its high performance and low latency. To serve the various market needs, NVM Express introduced ten new features in 1.3. The majority of the new features are optional, allowing customers a level of flexibility to fit the best needs for their workloads. Along with this, there are three new major features including:

• Sanitize offers a simple, fast, native way to completely erase data in an SSD, allowing more options for secure SSD reuse or decommissioning
• Virtualization provides more flexibility with shared storage use cases and resource assignment, enabling developers to flexibly assign SSD resources to specific virtual machines
• Streams offers better endurance for NAND-based SSDs using simple tagging of associated data from different tenants in cloud hosting applications

NVM Express states that these features have been added while maintaining low latency and high performance – making an NVMe device ready to take advantage of next generation bus speeds, including PCIe 4.0. 

Availability

The NVM Express 1.3 specification is available now for download.

NVM Express 1.3 specification

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