As the one of the inventors of NVMe at Fusion-io, David has long been a thought leader in the SSD space. Large steps forward were made in data processing when NVMe was embedded in the server, bringing large quantities of high-performance data into direct contact with processing. However, data driven workload requirements have since changed, dramatically: 1) Larger quantities of data are being created, analyzed, and processed; 2) Demands for performance are not just growing, but, accelerating; and, 3) Most importantly, data needs to be more usable.

Rapidly increasing data sizes, the high cost of data movement, and the advent of fast, NVMe-over-fabric based flash enclosures have led to the exploration of computation near flash for more efficient and economical storage solutions. Ordered key-value stores, commonly developed as software library code that runs inside application processes such as LevelDB and RocksDB, are one of many storage functions that can potentially benefit from offloaded processing.

With the growing trend for PCIe and CXL solutions, there is a need to improve the sideband management path as currently defined using SMBus. The newest SNIA SFF-TA-1009 specification for EDSFF PCIe devices released in January 2023 defined a method to allow I3C upgrade of the management SMBus/I2C bus. Other standards organizations, such as OCP and PCI SIG, are looking into adopting the same design.