IBM has added support for new and faster protocols to transfer data with increased speed

IBM  announced that it is currently working on Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) solutions to add support to the new and faster protocol in its products. According to the announcement, NVMe will result in massive speed and performance improvements for consumers that will result in lower latencies and decreased wait times. The adoption of this protocol is aimed at kick-starting an ‘industry-wide leap’ in the performance of data storage systems. The company is working on integrating the new interconnect protocol in its end-to-end storage stack to improve the speed at which consumers access their data. This will enable them to process and transfer massive files without the usual performance bottle-necks. IBM highlighted that NVMe is the new protocol that will replace the ageing SAS and SATA standards for solid state data storage mediums. IBM is looking at the first half of 2018 as the potential timeline to launch NVMe equipped storage devices across its portfolio. One thing to note here is that existing IBM portfolio already packs some of the features that NVMe is set to introduce. The company baked in these features in IBM FlashSystem A9000 which include the user-space I/O paradigm that allows apps to directly talk to the flash storage instead of navigating through different layers of the operating system. Other feature included in this ‘FileSystem’ is the local read-only cache (LROC) which keeps the data in reserve with decreased latency.