NVM Express, Inc. has announced a new wave of updates to the NVMe 2.3 base specification and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), alongside engineering change notices (ECNs) across 11 related specifications. The changes highlight faster recovery, enhanced security, and improved power management—key priorities for AI workloads, cloud infrastructure, enterprise storage, and gaming systems.
According to Mike Allison, chair of the NVMe Errata Task Group, the updates are based on feedback from NVMe’s membership, which now exceeds 1,000 participants. While only a few specifications were changed by technical proposals, eight proposals and eight ECNs have been ratified since the last update.
Key Features in NVMe 2.3 and NVMe-oF #
Faster Recovery from Failures #
A new rapid path failure recovery capability ensures communication can continue through alternative channels if a controller connection is lost. This avoids data corruption, prevents duplication of outstanding commands, and allows hosts to reset or recover paths quickly.
Enhanced Security #
Security received multiple upgrades:
- Cryptographic erase sanitization can now be applied to individual namespaces instead of entire subsystems.
- A configurable device personality feature enables secure host-driven reconfiguration, simplifying device inventory management and reducing SKUs across the manufacturing chain.
Smarter Power Management #
Power efficiency is a growing concern across both data centers and gaming PCs:
- Power limit configuration prevents compatibility issues when new NVMe devices consume more power than older gaming systems can handle.
- Self-reported drive power allows hosts to monitor real-time and lifetime power usage, including histograms of consumption and alerts for abnormal conditions.
Looking Ahead: Annual Update Cadence #
The NVMe community has experimented with faster updates in the past, but Allison emphasized that a six-month cycle was too demanding for both contributors and adopters. Going forward, NVMe will move to annual specification updates—a pace the ecosystem can more easily absorb.
Future proposals already in progress include:
- NVM subsystem live migration, building on controller migration features.
- SSD virtualization at the PCIe level to support live migration.
- Post-quantum security enhancements.
- Extending NVMe to run over ultra-Ethernet.
- Deeper integration with CXL for computational storage, enabling cache-line access to memory namespaces.
Sustainability also remains a key focus, with ongoing work in power management optimization.
NVMe’s Evolution Continues #
Since its major refactoring in 2021, the NVMe base specification has been streamlined to reduce complexity and better support multiple transports, including PCIe, TCP, and RDMA. NVMe-oF, first introduced in 2016, is now fully integrated into the base spec.
With annual updates now planned, NVMe is positioning itself for sustainable innovation—balancing the rapid pace of storage technology with the ecosystem’s ability to adopt and deploy new features effectively.