Proper Punctuation Marks the PCI Express Market

by David Raun, PLX president and CEO

As we hit cruising altitude in the 2014 in the tech industry, the year’s looking to be one of punctuated equilibrium that often characterizes evolution.  By that, I mean things tend to remain steady for a period, but then there’s a burst of innovation and design activity.

A prominent example that’s on everybody’s radar -- thanks to the cloud, data centers and the massiveness of content they contain – is storage.  An early adopter and now significant user of PCIe, enterprise storage has driven demand for architectures that enable highly scalable capacity yet must be efficient in terms of size, power and cost.  Solid-state storage in particular poses a challenge for storage-system designers, who’ve been handcuffed by a lack of standards to enable quick, efficient designs using off-the-shelf hardware and software.

Fortunately, though, standards such as NVMe, SATA Express, and SCSI Express are emerging to fill the void and make SSD-storage systems easier to implement and more cost-effective.  NVMe-based storage, in fact, is starting to show its colors; we expect that in 2014 this market will begin to ramp as we see systems based on this standard.

Also punctuating the market are enhancements to the PCIe specification, notably the new downstream port containment extension.  This key enhancement tackles the pervasive problem of data errors that often plague availability and reliability.  DPC has been in the works for a while, and we expect it to bear fruit this year, in the form of actual systems using the enhancement.

Not to be overlooked among the PCIe-related advances to evolve this year are the M.2 specification (once known as the Next Generation Form Factor) and M-PCIe (the M being for mobile applications).  M2 is poised to drive adoption of highly dense SSD-based storage on a variety of platforms.  This form factor, while not specific to PCIe, is looking like a catalyst for taking PCIe deeper into storage than it’s ever been.  For its part, M-PCIe was developed to allow PCIe to work efficiently in power-critical mobile devices – significant because heretofore, the alternative methods to achieve power efficiency involved moving between different protocols.

At the architecture level, 2014 will see an expansion of PCIe as a fabric, notably those based on PLX’s emerging ExpressFabric technology.  With PCIe already penetrated in applications inside the box, ExpressFabric should help accelerate the technology’s growth externally by connecting all boxes within racks – and in the process eliminate costly, power-hungry protocol translation hardware.  The beauty of this approach is that with some straightforward extensions of the existing standard, PCIe can be deployed as a low-power, cost-effective, high-performance fabric.

Yes, 2014 is shaping up to be a great year for PCIe in innovation, standards development and new applications.  And to that, let’s add an exclamation point – arguably the most appropriate punctuation of all!