What Is NVMe Storage?

NVMe Storage – NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) is a new storage access and transport protocol for flash and next-generation solid-state drives (SSDs) that delivers the highest throughput and fastest response times yet for all types of enterprise workloads.

Today, in both consumer apps and business, users expect ever-faster response times, even as the applications themselves become vastly more complex and resource dependent.

To help deliver a high-bandwidth, low-latency user experience, the NVMe protocol accesses flash storage via a PCI Express (PCIe) bus, which supports tens of thousands of parallel command queues and thus is much faster than hard disks and traditional all-flash architectures, which are limited to a single command queue.

The NVMe specification takes advantage of nonvolatile memory in all kinds of computing environments. And it’s future-proof, extendable to work with not-yet-invented persistent memory technologies.

What is NVMe Storage?

NVMe (non-volatile memory express) is a storage transfer protocol for accessing data quickly from flash memory storage devices such as solid-state drives (SSDs).

Fast, high-throughput, and massively parallel, the NVMe base specification enables flash memory to communicate directly with a computer via a high-speed peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) bus.

Extensions to the NVMe specification, maintained by NVM Express, are also available for a variety of network transfer protocols, including TCP, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand.

What Are NVMe Servers?

NVMe Servers refer to servers equipped with NVMe drives that deliver high throughput and ultra-fast response times for all types of enterprise workloads. NVMe (non-volatile memory express) is a new storage, access, and transport protocol created to accelerate the transfer speed of data between enterprise and client systems and solid-state drives via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. Basically, it is a cutting-edge technology for accessing the flash memory used in solid-state drives (SSDs).

The Functions of NVMe Storage in Servers

Thanks to NVMe’s unique and powerful functions, servers using NVMe drivers perform input/output tasks faster and transfer more data than servers with older drivers. The main functions of NVMe in servers are as follows.

NVMe is directly connected to CPU via PCle interface. The PCI Express bus allows NVMe drives to deliver more input/output operations per second (IOPs). This protocol supports 64k commands per queue up to 64k queues. And NVMe drives have a latency of only 2.8 microseconds, which is much lower than other drives.

Why Use NVMe Servers?

With the exponential growth of massive data and the emergence of new technologies such as IoT, AI, and blockchain, the vast amount of data needs to be analyzed, stored, and processed, driving enterprises to choose high-performance data processing and storage devices.

NVMe servers are uniquely built to deliver high-performance computing. The improved performance and reduced latency of NVMe servers make them suitable for workload-intensive applications that require real-time processing. They can effectively eliminate bottlenecks from too many requests or user connections to meet the growing data processing needs of enterprises.

The faster read/write speeds and enhanced queuing of NVMe servers can provide more reliable performance and a better experience for enterprises’ users or employees.

Besides, NVMe servers can appropriately address business challenges posed by big data and be used in data-intensive enterprise environments such as cloud storage and edge computing ecosystems. They can help organizations store, manage and access data more efficiently, while improving the performance and reliability of data processing and storage systems. Therefore, enterprises can measure their business and technology needs and then deploy NVMe servers.

Advantages of NVMe Servers

Powerful Performance

NVMe drives report read speed around 3GB/s and write speed around 1.5-2GB/s. While most SATA SSDs only deliver read and write speeds around 550MB/s. Therefore, NVMe servers offer superior performance compared to other servers. Besides, NVMe has been designed with more and deeper queues, supporting a larger number of commands in those queues. This enables servers with NVMe SSD to better optimize command execution for much higher concurrent IOPS (input/output operations per second).

Substantial Latency Improvements

The NVMe protocol leverages parallel and low-latency data paths similar to industry-standard processor architectures, resulting in significantly higher performance and lower latency for NVMe servers. By performing numerous I/O operations simultaneously, NVMe servers enable multicore processing, which can help organizations access, process, and manipulate data more efficiently. With faster data processing, NVMe servers can accelerate application response and reduce latency.

Ultra-large Storage

Nowadays, NVMe SSDs hard drives can achieve storage capacity of 10TB and above. And thanks to 3D NAND flash, the capacity of NVMe SSDs has exploded every year. As storage capacity development continues, it can be expected that NVMe SSDs may break the limit of 100TB storage space in just a few years. Therefore, servers with NVMe SSD will be able to achieve very large storage capacities.Posted in NVMe Storage