By Mike James, Director, Engineering, SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions
Dell World brings together industry visionaries and top technology professionals for powerful conversations about IT solutions to business issues. And, as the adoption of Flash technology continues to grow within enterprise data centers, client PCs, and mobile devices, IT managers and system architects must develop new standardized connectivity protocols, in addition to existing storage platforms – SAS and SATA – and interfaces, to keep up with ever-increasing performance demands.
NVM Express (NVMe) is an interface specification optimized for PCI Express based solid state drives (SSDs). Designed to integrate seamlessly within existing architectures, NVMe provides a standardized, consistent feature set across SSD vendors, including SanDisk, and offers immediate performance benefits that can be leveraged by existing software applications, caching solutions and operating systems to unleash the performance benefits of PCIe-connected SSDs, while acting as a bridge technology for future capabilities.
NVMe was developed to connect non-volatile memory SSDs to a compute subsystem, and optimized to efficiently process I/O operations. The efficiency of the per-I/O processing associated with the NVMe command set is a fraction (less than one-half) of the per-I/O processing overhead of a traditional SATA or SAS command set, resulting in enhanced scalability. Plus, designed to attach directly to the PCIe Root Complex, the NVMe command set passes across PCIe directly to an SSD to reduce latency and dramatically increase performance and efficiency.
The implementation of innovative industry storage standards, such as NVMe, provide end users and customers with numerous benefits in an ecosystem where these types of technology advancements will continue to become more prevalent in products released in 2013 and beyond. Offering full support of industry standards directly aligns with SanDisk’s commitment to providing IT managers and OEM system developers and designers with the best performing enterprise-class data storage solutions possible.
Interested in learning more? Come by SanDisk’s booth (#603) – we would be happy to discuss innovations and advancements to storage standards and how we’re working with Dell (who’s been active in defining and developing the new NVMe standard) as a direct result of the benefits and features of flash technology.
Mike James currently serves as a director of engineering at SanDisk, where he is responsible for the definition and development of future flash products and technologies primarily focused in the enterprise storage market. Prior to joining SanDisk, James served as the Director of SoC Development within the Storage Device Division for Toshiba America Information Systems. There he oversaw the development and design of the Toshiba’s first in-house-designed Enterprise Hard Disk Controller.
Prior to Toshiba, he spent eight years with Fujitsu’s storage products division as senior director for advanced development and VLSI development, where responsibilities included researching, developing and bringing to market next-generation disk drive technologies such as full disk encryption. James also developed the first mobile SATA SoC in the industry, as well as Fujitsu’s first in-house designed SAS Host Interface. Before joining Fujitsu, he managed a system-on-chip development team at Texas Instruments.
James has been awarded five research patents with several others pending, and is on the SCSI Trade Association (STA) board of directors where he works closely with other prominent storage professionals to promote the benefits of SCSI technology to the industry. James holds B.S. and M.E.E degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
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