WAKEFIELD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The NVM Express Workgroup, developer of the NVM Express specification for accessing solid-state drives (SSDs) on a PCI Express (PCIe) bus, held its first Plugfest at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab in Durham, N.H., May 13-16, 2013. This event provided an opportunity for participants to measure their products' compliance with the NVM Express (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 Solid-State Drives (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., Teledyne-LeCroy, 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, Vice President, Flash Product Planning, Samsung Electronics.
"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 Vice President and General Manager, 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."
PCIe SSDs passing the Compliance Tests and Interoperability procedures will be listed on the NVMe Integrators List at www.iol.unh.edu/services/testing/NVMe/integratorslist.php.
About NVM Express
NVM Express is an optimized, high performance, scalable host controller interface with a streamlined register interface and command set designed for enterprise and client systems that use PCI Express SSDs. NVM Express reduces latency and provides faster performance, with support for security and end-to-end data protection. Version 1.0 of the specification was released in March 2011, and Version 1.1 was published in October 2012.
About the NVM Express Workgroup
The NVM Express Workgroup was formed to define a new storage interface protocol, NVM Express, to enable the full performance potential provided by non-volatile memory storage technology as embodied in PCI Express solid state drives, in a standards-based approach that enables broad ecosystem adoption. The Workgroup consists of more than 80 companies from across the industry. Any organization interested in participating in the development and promotion of NVMe is invited to become a Contributor. All Contributors have equal input into the development of the specification. More information is available at www.nvmexpress.org.
PCI Express and PCIe are registered trademarks of the PCI SIG.
All other names mentioned may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.
