This week Chris and Martin talk to J Metz, R&D Engineer in Cisco Systems’ Advanced Storage division. This is a two-parter – the second episode will be published on Monday 30th September 2019.

The NVMe 1.4 specification has recently been published and is in the final 45-day ratification process. This discussion provides some background on NVMe then dives pretty deep into the NVMe standards and how design decisions are refactoring the NVMe protocol for version 2.0.

NVMe for consumer devices will be different to the feature set used within enterprise storage (although the protocol is the same). With NVMe-over-Fabrics, the underlying protocol provides independence in fabric choice, although the specific platform used will have an effect on performance. It’s all about trade-offs.

In part 2, will look a bit more into the specifics of NVMe 1.4 and what’s new.

For information on NVMe, check out our NVMe in the data centre report, available here.

Further information on NVM Express can be found here – https://nvmexpress.org/. You can find details on Fibre Channel at http://fibrechannel.org and more on J at http://jmetz.com

Finally, here are some useful links on NVMe:

* NVMe for Absolute Beginners* NVMe over Fabrics for Absolute Beginners* NVMe Program of Study

Elapsed Time: 00:24:55

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros* 00:01:50 – What is NVMe? Think memory.* 00:03:47 – NVMe over Fabrics – what is it?* 00:04:55 – Memory-to-Memory via q-pairs* 00:07:15 – How are NVMe standards developed?* 00:09:30 – Does it matter what release my device supports?* 00:12:00 – NVMe standards will be refactored with NVMe 2.0* 00:14:30 – Will fabric switches look different from each vendor?* 00:16:30 – Will terminology change with NVMe?* 00:19:15 – Protocols will be a technical choice, not idealogical* 00:20:30 – The Storage Triumvirate of Evil….* 00:24:50 – Wrap Up (for now)

Related Podcasts & Blogs

* #115 – The Transition to NVMe-oF Storage Solutions with Praveen Asthana* #97 – Building Storage Using NVMe/TCP with Kam Eshghi from Lightbits Labs* #89 – Choices in NVMe Architectures* #61 – Introduction to NVM Express with Amber Huffman

J’s Bio

J is currently an R&D Engineer for Advanced Storage in the Compute and Server Group for Cisco Systems, but has a broad and eclectic background of both academic, corporate, and industry experience. He is an award-winning public speaker, author, and contributor to industry trade publications. He has been active in industry standards, with membership on the Board of Directors for the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA),