NVM Express, Inc., the organization that developed the industry standard NVM Express (NVMe) specification for accessing solid-state drives (SSDs) on a PCI Express (PCIe) bus as well as across Fabrics, today announced the completion and release of its NVMe 1.3 specification. NVM Express has delivered on its commitment to Enterprise, Cloud, and Client customers by adding capabilities that meet the unique needs of each of these market segments, including Virtualization and Streams. The reach of the interface has expanded its support for the Mobile sector by adding the Boot Partitions feature, which enables bootstrapping of an SSD in a low resource environment. 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. The NVM Express 1.3 specification is available now for download.

"NVM Express is taking the solid-state drive ‘world by storm,' accelerating on a trajectory to go from the first units shipped in 2H'2014 to become the highest volume SSD interface in 1H'2018 based on gigabytes shipped - surpassing both SATA and SAS," said Amber Huffman, president of NVM Express. "As demonstrated by revision 1.3, the NVM Express working group is laser-focused on the specification's continued evolution to address the dynamic workloads and scenarios that NVMe serves."

"The SSD market is on a fast growth trajectory and is expected to reach $25 billion by 2019, with NVMe unit shipments representing the most widely used SSD interface overall," said Jeff Janukowicz, research vice president, IDC. "As NVM Express continues to develop and release improvements that address the evolving needs of the data center, customers will get the most effective use of their applications, such as big data, data analytics, virtualization and other data-intensive workloads."

New Features Address Fast Storage Needs
The NVMe 1.3 specification introduces over ten new features, serving various market segment needs. The majority of capabilities are optional, allowing customers to select the specific features that provide value to their workload. Major new features include Sanitize, Virtualization, and Streams. 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.