How Much Does NVM-Express Flash Really Boost IBM i Performance?

November 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With the NVM-Express protocol, a storage overlay for the PCI-Express peripheral bus that allows flash to be addressed in a parallel fashion as flash in its own right and not as emulated disk storage using a SATA or SCSI protocol, the idea is to get those vintage storage drivers out of the way and let the operating system kernel speak directly to the flash. This is done so the impressive – and seemingly always growing – I/O bandwidth of flash can actually be brought to bear to speed up applications.

Flash in general, and NVM-Express flash in particular, has been …