NVMe HDD Demoed At Open Compute Project Summit

Seagate engineers yesterday used the Open Compute Project Global Summit for the first public demonstration of a native NVMe hard drive. The hope is moving forward both HDDs and SSDs in the data center will consolidate to using the NVMe interface.

Seagate as well as Microsoft were using the OCP Global Summit for talking up NVMe HDD possibilities, including possible TCO advantages in the data center by simplifying the software stack, supporting common management APIs across SSDs and HDDs, have native support for multiple actuators with NVMe, and reducing component cost. Funny enough, Microsoft even promotes one of the NVMe HDD advantages as eliminating proprietary SAS/SATA drivers.

Unfortunately we are not allowed to share the slide deck from the event, but they hope this culmination of 3+ years work for NVMe HDDs will lead to the NVMe HDD specification being contributed to the Open Compute Project later this quarter. With the NVMe 2.0 specification released earlier this year is where the notion of rotational media was introduced.

The demoed NVMe HDD is making use of PCIe Gen3 while the next-gen units towards the end of 2022 are expected to support Gen4 and NVMe-OF x16 RNIC.

Additional OCP work related to NVMe HDD efforts can be found on the OpenCompute.org Wiki.