NVMe has been a top conversation this week, thanks in large part to OCP Global Summit in San Jose. During the event, KIOXIA America announced full production availability of NVMe-oF SSDs for Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) systems. The KIOXIA EM6 Series Enterprise system, using the Marvell 88SN2400 NVMe-oF SSD converter controller, converts an NVMe SSD into a dual-ported 25Gb NVMe-oF SSD, exposing the entire SSD bandwidth to the network.
NVMe has been a top conversation this week, thanks in large part to OCP Global Summit in San Jose. During the event, KIOXIA America announced full production availability of NVMe-oF SSDs for Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) systems. The KIOXIA EM6 Series Enterprise system, using the Marvell 88SN2400 NVMe-oF SSD converter controller, converts an NVMe SSD into a dual-ported 25Gb NVMe-oF SSD, exposing the entire SSD bandwidth to the network.
KIXIO EM6 NVMe-oF SSDs in Full Production
In simpler terms, the KIOXIA EM6 leverages an Ethernet interface making it easier to scale data center storage capacity.
The current approach with Conventional SSDs
Ethernet SSD-Enabled Approach
Applications such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning( ML), high-performance computing (HPC) and storage expansion can take full advantage of SSD performance utilizing native NVMe-oF architectures. We did an in-depth review of NVMe-oF in July 2020. If you are interested, you can get some great background on the technology. Ultimately, the approach KIOXIA and others are using, eliminates the need for a lot of infrastructure.
KIOXIA EM6 Series drives are NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage (GDS) certified. GDS connects to NVIDIA A100-based systems to accelerate AI/ML applications.
The EM6 Series drives support single or dual 25Gb Ethernet and RDMA over Converged Ethernet(RoCE) network connectivity and are NVMe-oF 1.1 and 1.4 compliant. A real positive of working with KIOXIA is their affinity for working with other vendors to bring technology to market. KIOXIA, Marvell, Foxconn-Ingrasys, and Accton worked together to bring EBOF solutions to market, including direct-attached, network-attached devices in the KIOXIA Ethernet SSD Storage system.
Final Thoughts
The KIOXIA EM6 system offers a long-term use case for evolving data centers. With everchanging technology and advancements in PCIe protocols and interfaces, the one constant is Ethernet. The KIOXIA EM6 NVMe-oF SSD connectors are compatible with both PCIe and Ethernet, making this a design built to last into the future. This isn’t Ethernet storage’s first rodeo though. Prior efforts have lacked any significant traction in the enterprise. It’s with much anticipation we watch to see if this time around, there’s a greater appetite.
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