Non-Volatile Memory Express, or NVMe, is a communications standard and protocol developed to fully utilize the speed of the PCIe bus for faster, more efficient storage hardware access.
NVMe was developed to be deployed in computer hardware systems with solid state drives (SSDs) and arrays (SSAs) by a consortium of hardware manufacturers that includes Intel, Sandisk, Samsung, Seagate and Dell EMC.
NVMe originated as a Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface (NVMHCI) specification working group headed by Intel in 2007, and the initial 1.0 specification was released in April 2008. Since then, NVMe specifications have been developed and released by the NVM Express Workgroup, whose membership includes more than 90 companies.
Because it has been designed specifically for optimizing high performance and non-volatile storage devices like SSDs, NVMe has become popular for providing a performance boost for everything from consumer desktops and laptops up to compute-intensive enterprise, cloud and Edge computing environments.