Unveiled at FMS (the Future of Memory and Storage, formerly Flash Memory Summit), being held in Santa Clara, California, USA the solution replaces electrical wiring with optical wiring within devices in data centres. This enables significant expansion of physical distances between devices, slimming down wiring, while maintaining energy efficiency and high signal quality. It also allows for greater flexibility in data centre system design and applications.
By adopting an optical interface, it is possible to aggregate individual components that make up systems such as SSDs and CPUs and seamlessly interconnect them, furthering the evolution of a "disaggregated computing system" that can efficiently utilise resources according to the workload.
In addition, with its high signal integrity, the optical interface is expected to contribute to high-performance computing system implementation that operate in harsh environments, such as space.
“The KIOXIA broadband SSD with optical interface prototype, when realised alongside other optical-based devices and systems within data centre infrastructure has the potential to revolutionise data centres as we know them”, explained Axel Störmann, Chief Technology Officer & VP at KIOXIA Europe. “The new SSDs will allow the development of future ‘greener’ server environments offering not only overall energy efficiency but also greater storage efficiency, scale, and performance (improved throughput and latency).”
These developments were achieved as a result of the Next Generation Green Data Center Technology Development project that’s funded by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) under the Green Innovation Fund Project: Construction of Next Generation Digital Infrastructure.
In this grant project, next-generation technologies are being developed with one of the goals set out to achieve more than 40% energy savings compared to current data centres. As a part of this project, KIOXIA is developing broadband SSDs with an optical interface for data storage in next-generation green data centres.
