NVMe™ over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) Explained You may have heard of NVMe over Fabrics, or its acronym NVMe-oF, but you may still not be clear on what exactly it is and how it will impact or affect your IT infrastructure. Here’s NVMe-oF explained. NVMe – What is it? Before we dive into NVMe-oF let’s take a step back to make sure we understand the foundation – NVMe. Early flash storage devices were connected via SATA or SAS – protocols that were developed decades ago for hard disk drives (HDDs) and are still widely used for data infrastructure. SATA and SAS connected flash storage provided huge performance gains over HDDs. Yet, as speeds increased – on CPUs, backplanes, DRAM, and networks – the SATA and SAS protocols began to limit the performance from flash devices. SATA and SAS protocols accounted for HDD characteristics, such as rotational delay, head seek times, etc. that add unnecessary complexity for flash-based media. In order to take full advantage of flash storage performance, the Non-Volatile-Memory-Express (NVMe) protocol was created (version 1.0 in early 2008).