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Flash storage has radically changed the IT landscape. While the most obvious benefit is improved application performance, Enterprise Strategy Group research shows flash users have experienced improved reliability and resource utilization, as well as reduced TCO. Solid-state storage continues to transform the data center, but what's next? Nonvolatile memory express, or NVMe storage, is one technology to watch. Think about the entire data path for a second. Applications demand processing -- typically in the form of servers -- and access to data via reads and writes across some sort of interconnect or storage network to a storage device. That model is overly simplistic, but it helps illustrate my point. With spinning disk technology, the storage device was often the bottleneck in the data path. Using a memory cache to accept write requests and serve a subset of read requests helped reduce latencies, but, typically, the entire system was limited to HDD performance. Even with the performance benefits of spreading, or striping, data ...