PCIe interfaces give SSDs are real performance boost. It’s easy to scale that performance immediately by adding PCIe lanes—unlike the SAS and SATA disk-interface specs, SSD vendors need not wait for the next, faster release of the PCIe spec to go faster. However, server and PC hosts don’t yet automatically see PCIe-attached SSDs as storage devices and so vendors must offer drivers to fill the gap. Not all drivers are created equal, which complicates matters for system integrators.
The Solid-State Storage Initiative technical group, part of SNIA (the Storage Networking Industry Association), plans to alleviate this potential interoperability problem. A task force has been set up to address these incompatibility challenges. Task force member companies include a collection of the leading drive and system vendors:
- Agilent
- Allion
- Apacer
- Calypso
- Cisco
- CLabs
- Corsair
- Coughlin Associates
- Dell
- eTron
- Fusion-io
- HDS
- HP
- HGST
- Huawei
- Intel
- Lecroy
- Lenovo
- Lotes
- LSI
- Marvell
- Micron
- Molex
- Mushkin
- Objective Analysis
- OCZ
- Oracle
- Phison
- Renesas
- Samsung
- SanDisk
- Seagate
- SMART Storage
- STEC
- Taejin
- Tektronix
- TMS
- Toshiba
- Tyco
- Unigen
- Viking
- Virident
- Western Digital
Denali Memory Report 
While the past picture of PCIe-attached SSDs relied on proprietary driver stacks, the NVMe Spec from nvmexpress.org and the SOP & PQI Standards from T10 look to reconcile vendor-unique aspects. This SNIA effort looks to me to be not an interface specification group, but rather an educational outreach to the user community on best practices and such. I’m assuming they’ll suggest adoption of products compliant to NVMe, SOP/PQI, or both.