Following are some releases related to or made at the 2023 FMS in Santa Clara, CA from August 7-10, 2023. FMS is the world’s largest independent storage and memory conference and features all types of storage and memory and related technologies including NAND and NOR Flash, DRAM, CXL, UCIe, DNA storage and magnetic tape.
PCIe is the fast physical computer interface that NVMe and CXL communicate over. The performance of these interconnect technologies depends upon the performance of the underlying physical connections. PCIe 6.0 will double the effective performance of PCIe 5.0. Optical physical interconnect technologies promise to offer higher performance communication that may be used from the chiplet to data center scale.
The PCIe SIG recently announced the formation of a new working group to deliver PCIe technology over optical interconnects. At the 2023 FMS Lightelligence announced that it was introducing optical interconnects for PCIe and CXL connectivity. The company’s Photowave, and optical networking (oNET) transceiver allows data center managers to scale resources within or across server racks. The company’s optical networking technology was on display at FMS.
Photowave interconnects remote devices together using CXL over lower-latency fiber optic cable, extending communicationreach to enable memory pooling at pod scales and beyond. This facilitates scalable CXL fabrics in the composable data center. The Photowave product line includes various form factors, including a standard PCIe card (shown below), OCP 3.0 SFF card, and an active optical cable to achieve deployment of CXL-based infrastructure. They can be used in server platforms, CXL switches, memory appliances, and xPUs.
WDC announced its enhanced OpenFlex Data24 3200 NVMe-oF just a bunch of flash (JBOF) storage platform and their Ultrastar DC SN655 PCIe Gen 4.0 dual port NVMe SSD and its next generation RapidFlex A2000 and C2000 NVMe-oF fabric bridge devices.
The company’s RapidFlex PCIe to Ethernet bridge chip supports this updated storage platform. The image below shows various applications for the RapidFlex chip.
The Western Digital OpenFlex Data24 3200 is an integrated NVMe-oF storage platform that allows separating storage resources from computing and sharing it over Ethernet. This allows Data24 storage to be available to multiple applications and servers, allowing improved storage utilization without overprovisioning.
Up to six hosts can be attached to the 2U 24-bay Data24 3200 without a switch. Using a switched environment allows scaling to even more hosts. This results in scale-out or scale-up capabilities for up to petabytes of NVMe flash with low latency. The product enables RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and TCP connection support.
The image below shows the RapidFlex chip and bridge adapter as well as the new Ultrastar DC SN655 PCIe® Gen 4.0 dual-port NVMe SSD and their combination into the OpenFlex architecture.
The Ultrastar DC SN655 expands prior generation storage capacities up to 15.36TB and increases drive reliability to 2.5M hours mean time between failures (MTBF). It provides more than 1M random read IOPS and is available in a U.3 15mm form factor that is U.2 backward compatible. It also supports enterprise features such as power-fail protection and end-to-end data path protection.
At the 2023 FMS many storage and memory technologies were on display. Leading up to the conference PCIe said that they would include optical connectivity with Lightelligence was showing CXL optical interconnects and WDC several NVMe product technologies.
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