NVM Express Elects Facebook and Toshiba to Board

[btarunr]

NVM Express, Inc., the organization that developed the NVM Express specification for accessing solid-state drives (SSDs) on a PCI Express (PCIe) bus, today announced the results of its recent board elections. Elected to Promoter positions were Facebook, Micron, Microsoft, Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. Facebook and Toshiba are new to the Promoter level, and the others are incumbents. The election winners join existing Promoters Cisco, Dell EMC, Intel, Microsemi, NetApp and Oracle, whose current terms expire at the end of 2017.

Representatives from the 13 Promoter companies form the NVM Express, Inc. Board of Directors, which governs the organization, including setting strategic direction. All Contributor and Promoter member companies are eligible to run for Promoter positions, where there are elections each year for roughly half the positions.

"We're very pleased to welcome Toshiba and Facebook to the NVM Express, Inc. Board, to help shape the future direction of NVM Express technology and the organization," said Amber Huffman, NVM Express President. "In 2016, we marked major milestones, such as publishing the NVM Express over Fabrics specification. We look forward to publishing revision 1.3 in the first half of this year - with much more to come later in 2017."

"Toshiba is honored to join the NVM Express Promotor group of companies. We look forward to working with the other industry leaders on the Board of Directors to set the future direction for the NVM Express standard. Joining the NVM Express Board of Directors and becoming a Promotor company underscore Toshiba's commitment and significant investment in the future success of NVM Express," said Jeremy Werner, SSD Vice President Marketing and Product Planning, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc.

"The creation of high-bandwidth and low-latency storage is important to scaling our infrastructure, and we need to create standards around non-volatile memory devices that are constantly evolving. We're thrilled to join the NVM Express Board of Directors and be part of this already successful process. By coming together, we will all have a much greater impact," said Chris Petersen, Hardware Systems Technologist at Facebook.

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[deu]

I know facebook is trying to get its fingers out in the world but does this even makes sense? I anyone have arguments I would love to hear them. Other than that facbook uses alot of servers and own a few companies where this technology could make sense I dont see their competence in the area (again enlighten me! )

 

[ZeDestructor]

I know facebook is trying to get its fingers out in the world but does this even makes sense? I anyone have arguments I would love to hear them. Other than that facbook uses alot of servers and own a few companies where this technology could make sense I dont see their competence in the area (again enlighten me! )

NVMe is cheaper than SATA and SAS already, and it's only going down. Another 3-4 price drops, and SSDs will be cheaper than HDDs as well soon.

Combining that together with the sheer scale of facebook (big enough they can bully Intel into building Xeon-D, and build OCP from scratch covering power, compute, networking and storage), and it makes obvious sense that they want to have some input on future NVMe revisions. On top of that, facebook is currently one of the driving developers behind btrfs (a next-gen linux filesystem), several networking software bits (firewall, switching dataplane control, schedulers), storage systems (custom blu-ray libraries, custom dense HDD/SSD arrays).

Hell, at this point, I'm pretty sure facebook is like Google and is buying NAND directly from the big 4 and plugging it into their own controllers (FPGA-based most likely).