With the increasing maturity and wider adoption of flash-based storage in data centers, the broader industry has recognized the need for standardized, efficient protocols and interfaces that are optimized for low-latency, performance-dense storage media (such as flash) and upcoming non-volatile memory technologies.

This IBM Redbooks® Point-of-View publication presents important aspects of the NVM Express (NVMe) protocol and its different flavors as well as the new paradigm for storage access that it enables. It discusses the implications of the NVMe protocol for the enterprise storage industry in general and the transformative effect it has for IBM Storage in particular. The paper presents experimental results that demonstrate the potential of the new technologies.