NVMe 2.1 Revealed At The 2024 Flash Memory Summit

NVMe Over Fabric And Even More Nifty Storage News Below

There is quite a bit of interesting news for storage enthusiasts today, from a prototype optical SSD to a 122TB SSD to bad news about the longevity of the drives we use.  The most interesting is the announcement of the NVMe 2.1 specifications, which was revealed at the Flash Memory Summit.  There are a mix of new and updated features, many aimed at Enterprise usage but of benefit to the enthusiast as well.

NVMe 2.1 introduces NVMe over Fabrics features, to speed the movement of data over local networks and will be of great benefit to LLMs and other machine learning clusters.  NVMe Network Boot will allow you to move the OS to your faster drives and will pair wonderfully with a variety of new NVMe High Availability features to ensure you don’t need to reboot your storage clusters very often.

In addition, you will see the ability to migrate NVMe controllers and attached namespaces on live systems without having to shut anything down, which could have a seriously impressive impact on future generations of NAS devices.  The security minded will like the idea of being able to enable unique encryption keys for each read/write operation, and with the speed of NVMe that feature shouldn’t slow your systems noticeably.

Read more about NVMe 2.1 at Phoronix and this link to the actual announcement.