Paul Caylor

Overview

Paul Caylor is a storage architect at Hewlett Packard Enterprise who represents HPE's requirements in the OCP NVMe specification process. His primary focus at the October 2025 OCP Global Summit was the security, form-factor, and power-efficiency requirements driving NVMe spec 2.7.

Post-quantum cryptography is the dominant security theme in spec 2.7. Caylor reported that federal customers have already begun preferring CNSA 2.0 algorithms in RFQs ahead of an expected January 1, 2027 mandate, creating urgency to accelerate PQC adoption across the industry. A concrete consequence is a sideband bandwidth problem: PQC signatures transmitted over SPDM are roughly 50 times larger than classical ECDSA signatures, and some algorithms produce signatures up to 500 times larger, requiring spec 2.7 to add I3C with double data rate to keep management traffic feasible. Spec 2.7 also introduces dual-signed firmware requirements so that a single SKU can be sold worldwide — the US is committed fully to PQC while some EU governments require both classical and PQC algorithms to be supported simultaneously, a split addressed by the SPDM 1.4 multi-bank architecture.

On form factor, Caylor pushed back against any trajectory that forces customers entirely off low-power, low-capacity NVMe drives. He argued the industry must continue producing SATA-replacement-class NVMe devices — 480 GB or 960 GB at only 6–7 watts — so that customers still on SATA SSDs can migrate without being forced onto high-power, high-capacity data-center NVMe drives.

Power efficiency more broadly is under structural pressure. Caylor noted that PCIe Gen 6, Gen 7, and Gen 8 are arriving in rapid succession, and simply doubling drive power at each generation to saturate available bandwidth is not a viable industry strategy; major innovation in watts-per-gigabyte efficiency is required.