SSDs are now available for hyperscale data centres

KIOXIA Europe GmbH now offers production-ready availability of its 9.5mm XD6 Series Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E1.S data centre class SSDs. Launched in late 2020, the drives were the first EDSFF E1.S SSDs to satisfy the particular demands of hyperscale applications, including the performance, power and thermal requirements of the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD Specification.

The SSDs are intended to optimise system density, efficiency, and management. As illustrated by the EDSFF consortium and using the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD Specification, the small form factor device replaces the M.2 form factor and provides higher density, reliability, performance, and thermal management. It is also intended to be hot-pluggable for increased serviceability – another benefit over M.2.

Employing KIOXIA BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory, the read-intensive series provides 1 DWPD endurance, is compliant to NVMe 1.3c and PCIe 4.0 specifications and is offered in capacities of 1.92TB and 3.84TB. An option for TCG-Opal 2.0 encryption is provided as well.

EDSFF E1.S is aimed at large-scale deployments in hyper-scale data centres due to its capability to scale in terms of power, capacity, performance, and thermals. Drives created to the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD specification can be employed in the new OCP Yosemite V3 platform developed by Meta (formerly Facebook).

“Microsoft and the OCP Storage workgroup demonstrated how an open collaboration across the industry could align hyperscalers, system designers and SSD vendors around next-generation storage form factors,” said Jason Adrian, senior director of Azure Platform Architecture, Microsoft. “The EDSFF E1.S form factor is the future of flash storage in hyperscale data centres, including Azure platforms. Solid-state disks designed to the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD specification, such as the KIOXIA XD6 Series, will power the next generation of EDSFF E1.S-based servers.”

“We are pleased to offer our customers substantial advantages and subsequently an improvement in TCO through our new drives that are thermally more efficient, offer improved cooling while providing much higher performance,” said Frederik Haak, senior manager SSD Marketing and Engineering at KIOXIA Europe GmbH. “New specifications and form factors, such as EDSFF, are the advancements that datacentre and edge application need for more efficient, optimised flash memory deployment.”