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The nonvolatile memory express specification, developed to maximize the benefits of flash-based storage, has evolved quickly and significantly since it was a gleam in the storage industry's eyes in the mid-2000s. Today, NVMe SSD technology is poised to enter the enterprise mainstream. A recent G2M report, "NVM Express Ecosystem Snapshot," described the NVMe market as having nearly 300 products from nearly 100 companies. G2M estimated the NVMe market, with its varying hardware and software components, will grow to $65 billion over the next three years, around three times what it is worth today. How did we get here? The Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface working group released the NVMHCI specification, the precursor to NVMe, in 2008. NVMHCI provided a standard interface to support SSDs and write drivers while addressing barriers to flash performance in servers when using SAS and SATA interconnects. Building on this work to maximize the parallelism inherent in flash storage technology to reduce latency, the NVM Express ...