IDC’S POINT OF VIEW
NVMe is a new storage protocol that IDC believes will begin to eclipse SCSI in the primary storage market by the end of 2021. NVMe is used to connect NVMe solid state disk (SSD) drives as well as a new class of emerging memory technologies referred to as “storage-class memory”. NVMe provides the performance characteristics of the somewhat more mature PCIe standard, accessing persistent storage media in a byte-addressable manner using direct memory access (DMA), but in a much more scalable design that makes it well suited for use in enterprise-class storage platforms. Relative to SCSI, NVMe supports much higher storage performance, in terms of lower latencies, higher throughput and bandwidth, and parallelism, and will be required to support emerging memory technologies like SCM. NVMe is much more efficient than SCSI, which was designed for hard disk drives not memory-based media, and allows the design of enterprise-class systems that support much denser mixed enterprise workloads without “noisy neighbor” issues. IDC expects that, by the end of 2021, NVMe-based storage systems will be driving over 50% of all primary external storage revenue.